


Hungarian Dances

by eldritcher



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adult Content, Dark, Love, M/M, Pastiche, Prisoner of War, Psychology, Satire, Triggers, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:00:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9528887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: In which Harry sets up residence at Nurmengard, in which Grindelwald sings to the wolves, in which a world falls apart outside their castle walls. Voldemort is losing a war, and Dumbledore is collecting jewelry.





	1. Where we once loved and sung

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Himnusz](https://archiveofourown.org/works/204704) by [eldritcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher). 
  * Inspired by [I shall not call the sunbeam bright](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008775) by [andune (eldritcher)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/andune). 



> Thank you for giving the Dances a try. Please watch your step around sexual content and possible triggers.

Hestia spoke, sombre, of the fallen. 

“Many of our Slytherin half-blood and Muggle-born students, who refused to take the Mark, have been subjected to prolonged torture in the dungeon of Lestrange Manor. Twelve have perished to their injuries, according to Severus’s latest report. They will be moved soon to another location, according to another report we have received from a trusted source.” 

Harry had played Quidditch with them. He had been in classes with them. Mrs. Weasley looked close to faint. Hermione, sitting beside Harry, was quietly crying. He squeezed her hand to comfort. He had no words. None of them had words for the atrocities they heard of everyday, that they partook of everyday, on each side of the war. He dared look at Snape, whose stony face gave nothing away. 

“Red falls the dew on my silver leaves,” Phineas said sadly, from his portrait. Snape’s face twisted into an ugly grimace of pain. Harry hastily looked away, overwhelmed. 

“We must discuss this situation at length,” Dumbledore said, looking careworn and tired. “There are many pressing concerns, including this. Harry’s safety is the first item on our agenda tonight.” 

“I want to fight with you!” Harry roared.

Hermione’s hand clutched him desperately, pulling him back to his seat. He winced slightly when he saw the disapproving looks on the faces of the many portraits around. Snape, seated with his cup of tea, right beside Harry’s seething form, only smirked as if Harry had performed to expectation. Ron looked righteously offended on Harry’s behalf. Good! At least someone agreed with him! Mr. Weasley looked sad. Remus looked worried by Harry’s outburst. Was he thinking back to the days after Sirius’s death, when Harry had been inconsolably angry? 

“Albus-” McGonagall began placatingly, seeing Harry’s resolve, knowing Dumbledore’s obstinacy. 

“Let the boy fight,” grumbled a voice Harry did not know well. Oh, Aberforth. The barkeeper. Dumbledore’s odd brother. “It is his fight more than anyone else’s.” 

Fawkes trilled, as if in assent.

Dumbledore leaned forward across his large desk, and his eyes were piercing blue as he gazed upon Harry. Hatred, intense and overpowering, blazed through Harry, and he looked away, and he knew, just as Dumbledore knew what was in him. It was the same hatred that had consumed him in his fifth year, and the reason why Snape had to be the one to attempt to teach him to close his stupid mind. Had he attacked Mr. Weasley in that department? Had that been Nagini? Guilt had plagued him for so long. 

“Your safety is paramount,” Dumbledore said calmly. 

And Harry heard what was unsaid. He was compromised. He had been compromised all his life, by magic gone awry, by spite that was not his. 

“Will he have to be with his relatives?” Mrs. Weasley asked softly, worried for Harry. 

Harry flinched. Dumbledore’s expression moved from resolve into sadness. 

“Do you know what you are sending me to?” Harry wanted to ask, but he remained quiet. 

Moody was missing. Snape was taking risks Harry did not want to hear about. Tonks was badly injured. Fred was in hiding somewhere in Ireland. Hermione had not heard from her parents in weeks. Mrs. Weasley obsessively watched her clock. Dumbledore was battling on, despite age and resource constraints, trying to convince the Ministry of the need to consolidate and wage war. 

“The Burrow-” Mrs. Weasley began tentatively. 

“No,” Dumbledore said politely, firmly. “He will be the safest with his aunt.”

——-

Neither Vernon nor Dudley was home when Dumbledore brought Harry to Privet Drive.

“Take this, Harry,” Dumbledore said, extending his hand. 

Harry took the cylindrical package carefully.

“A portkey?” 

“Only a bauble,” Dumbledore said quietly, bringing his hand to pat Harry’s shoulder. Hatred surged in Harry, unbidden. Dumbledore sighed and took his hand away. “That I must protect you, even from myself.” 

“I am compromised. I understand that.” 

“Oh, Harry,” Dumbledore murmured, and his eyes were on Harry’s scar. “I must protect you, even from myself.”

The exchange left Harry uncomfortable. For once, he was glad to see Petunia’s dour face in the window. He walked to his prison alone. 

——-

“Lock the door,” Petunia muttered uneasily, as Harry trudged up the stairs. 

He nodded. It was of no use. It only served to enrage the man. Did she know that? What did it matter? 

He was right. The clock in the hall was striking two when footsteps, normally loud, softly padded to his door. The door creaked open, indiscernible over Dudley’s snore in the next room, and yet Harry could hear it very well indeed.

“Welcome back, boy.” 

When he felt fingers brush his wrist, he panicked, unusually. He had taught himself to not do that, with effort, long ago. He panicked though, and perhaps that was because he had been thinking of the poor Muggleborns and Half-bloods in Lestrange Manor. He was snake and he was boy. The snake tasted fear in the air on his forked tongue, and the boy tasted alcohol and weed. He was cold and he was warm. The stones brushed his belly and nails scraped his sheets. He wound up wood and iron, into warmth, over a body that rose alarmed, and there was heat and fear so sweet, and there was control he could exercise over another, and there was victory in the panicked struggling of his victim. His body was puny underneath a heavier one, and his body was colossal, dwarfing that beneath him. His scar burned, and he saw the world in eldritch colours through the eyes of a snake, and below his victim ceased struggling. There was blood in his mouth where his assailant had bitten him, and his tongue flickered out to taste the pulse at his quarry’s throat. 

“Freak!” The voice sounded worried. “Why are your eyes red?” 

When he spoke, he spoke in the language of snakes. 

———

He was dumped in the wee hours of the morning in the woods. He guessed it must be near the picnic site Petunia had taken Dudley to, when he had been younger. He had seen their photographs hanging on the walls. The trees looked the same. He lay there, watching the leaves rustle, and the squirrels gather berries, and let the damp earth soak his clothes. Everything looked normal. He swallowed bile as he realised what had happened the previous night. He had seen the world through the snake’s eyes again. 

He had to try to get word to Dumbledore. He had try and make it back to Petunia, to the safety her blood afforded him. Dumbledore, and everyone else, had enough to worry about without adding this to the mix. 

The burning in the scar left a sick feeling in his gut. He knew that at least one person was aware of his misfortune. And it was one person who knew how to find him. He clumsily pushed himself to a sitting position and looked about, wondering what Hermione’s smart head would do in this situation, wondering what Ron’s strategy would be. When he heard the distinct crack of Apparation, he heaved himself up against the bole of the nearest tree. 

Voldemort looked much the same. Thinner, if anything. Harry wondered if he was alone. 

“Where is your wand?” 

“At home.” He saw no reason to lie. What would it serve him? 

“Home.”

“Home?” Voldemort asked incredulously, with a sneer, before reining himself in, and continuing briskly, “There is nothing you can do now. You may run, but I doubt you will get far. You are injured. Come with me without a fuss.”

“Make it easy for you? It isn’t as if you would torture me any less before killing me,” Harry muttered. 

He would run. He wasn’t going to make it convenient, even if he knew the outcome. Did he have a right to survive? Hermione liked to talk about rights. You are a human being, she kept saying. Human beings had rights. Had he given his up when marked in Godric’s Hollow? 

Voldemort seemed to lose patience with him, because he was stunned immediately. 

———- 

When he woke, he was cold and shivering, and on stones dirty and old, in a dungeon. He got to his knees, determined to do what he could, determined to die bravely, like his poor parents had, like Sirius had. He touched the nearest wall and inched around the space. He found the bars, cold and rusting, keeping him captive. He walked on, until he stumbled on a leg. Laughter greeted him, maniacal and hoarse, and he jumped back, frightened, suddenly thinking of the Lestranges. 

Then a hoarse, broken voice began singing in a foreign accent. It sounded like a Russian accent to Harry. It reminded him of Krum and Karkaroff. 

‘‘Beneath the fort, a ruin now,  
Joy and pleasure erst were found,  
Only groans and sighs, I trow,  
In its limits now abound.  
But no freedom’s flowers return  
From the spilt blood of the dead,  
And the tears of slavery burn,  
Which the eyes of orphans shed.”

“Who are you?” Harry asked, bravely, from the other side of the dungeon, where he had retreated to. He was crying, he found, full of despair, as he realised he would die there. He had thought Voldemort would torture him and kill him immediately. 

“Before there were wands and wars, before little girls falling, there were two boys who loved lemon drops.”

Lemon drops? 

“Do you know Dumbledore?” Harry asked softly, trying to keep his mind on his fellow prisoner, hoping that it was a fellow prisoner and not a torturer. 

“It does not matter, little orphan.” 

“Where am I?” 

“Nurmengard.” 

Nurmengard. The name rang a bell. Grindelwald had kept prisoners there. It had been his stronghold. Dumbledore had defeated Grindelwald and freed the prisoners. So was this Voldemort’s new torture dungeon now? He supposed it made sense. Voldemort had made a life out of stealing and occupying what others had made. Why build something when you could occupy a place meant for the same purpose? 

“Have you been here long?” 

“Sleep well, sweet prince,” his fellow prisoner croaked, and laughed. It was a sad, mean laugh. 

———

He woke shivering. There was only the darkness and the rattling snores of the old man in the dungeon. Harry sneezed then, as the musty air suddenly irritated his lungs. 

“Sorry,” he apologised, as the old man snarled awake. 

“Our keeper is coming,” the man grumbled. “Our daily meal, thanks be given unto him.” 

“How?” Harry asked blearily, trying not to sneeze again. 

“The castle talks to me, sweet prince.” 

“My name is Harry.” 

The old man laughed. “You can be whoever I want here. It is only us, after all.”

Something about the man unnerved Harry. He just waited there, in silence, until the bars clanged open, and he felt the familiar magic of Voldemort. 

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked bravely, looking up at the shadowy figure above. His bravery was interrupted by a sneeze. The old man laughed again.

“Enough out of you both,” Voldemort said impatiently. 

A solitary scone lit up in the dark corridor outside the cell, and Harry wished that Voldemort had not done that, because his fellow prisoner’s face was thrown into the light, and Harry had never seen a man like that before. He looked spectral and carven to the bone, with flesh hanging loose and aged all over, as if he were a corpse animated. When he grinned at Harry’s frightened face, there were only a few, rotten teeth left in his mouth. His eyes were the only living pieces, bright blue slivers they were, and they reminded Harry of Dumbledore so. 

“Here,” Voldemort said, stooping forward and placing two steaming bowls of soup carefully on the uneven flagstones. “You will be staying here tonight, Harry. Your cell is not ready yet.” 

“Ever the nice host, for an usurping bastard,” the old man croaked. 

Voldemort did not react, surprising Harry. He knew how touchy Voldemort was about that stuff. Then again, what could Voldemort do to this man who looked terribly torn up by fate and time? This was not a man who feared torture or death. 

Harry sneezed again. 

“Dumbledore will find me,” he told them boldly, and glared at the soup. He was hungry. He was cold too. He wondered how the old prisoner was still alive. 

“Drink your soup,” Voldemort ordered. Then he glared at the old man, who cackled again, and left the cell. The bars burned gold as he sealed them tight. 

“Fancy magic,” the old man muttered, and drew his soup to him. “Pity it is wasted on a wretch like him.” 

“Does he bring food everyday?” 

“Yes, Harry, doll. As befits the master of the house. He tends to its repairs and feeds its hapless souls.”

Harry looked at the soup, unwilling to look at the old man. 

“Dumbledore doesn’t look like me, does he?”

“No.” 

The old man laughed again, and Harry sneezed. 

“Drink your soup, little prince. This is barely the beginning.” 

The soup was warm. Chicken. It tasted nothing like Mrs. Weasley’s. The old man’s shadows on the wall were less frightening than him. Harry kept his eyes tightly on the ladle and did not say anything. 

———

When he woke, the old man was lying right beside him, and he was peering at Harry closely, in wonder. His breath was foul and his eyes unnerved Harry so. Harry fought his instinctive response to rear back, to put some distance between them. The old man extended a long, gnarly finger to touch Harry’s scar. It did not flare in pain. The finger extended downwards, across his cheek, and tapped his nose twice. Harry did not flinch, though he was quaking inside thinking of Privet Drive. 

“Brave, little prince,” the old man crooned, and then shuffled away to let Harry be. 

———

Voldemort came back after a few hours, or so it seemed to Harry, who had lost track of day and night, of time, and yet he could have been there only for a day. How did the old man manage? 

“Don’t take him away,” the old man grumbled. Harry sneezed.

“Come on,” Voldemort said, brisk and purposeful, as he Stunned Harry again. 

When he came to, he was in a little cell with golden bars. It was clean. There was a cot. There was a pitcher of water. There was a chamberpot. 

“What more do you need?” Voldemort asked, arms crossed on his chest, as if daring Harry to say anything. 

Harry wisely stayed silent. 

“Here,” Voldemort said, brandishing a little, plastic bottle before him, before keeping it near the pitcher. 

Harry did not dare look at it until Voldemort had left. It was a bottle of paracetamol.  
———

That was the last he saw of Voldemort. A bowl of chicken soup appeared in his cell, at what seemed to be regular intervals. It vanished after two hours. The pitcher was charmed to refill when empty. The chamberpot was charmed to vanish its contents when full. 

He craved bread. He craved tea. He craved a bath. He craved clean clothes. He was sure he smelled as foul as the man he had spent his first night in this castle with. He shuddered. Most of all, he craved sunlight and company. He hallucinated Hermione’s bright voice, Ron’s reassuring face, Petunia’s dour comments, and even Snape’s cutting remarks. He wanted to touch, to be touched. He wanted to be heard. 

He was an expert at loneliness. He had managed that in the cupboard for years. Maybe he had softened up because of his time at Hogwarts, with Ron and Hermione, with Hagrid and Sirius, with the Weasleys, and because of all the people he had come to love. 

He cried himself to sleep after his bowl of soup. 

Dream and waking blurred often for him. The bowls of soup were the only markers of time. He was awake when he ate. He was in daze otherwise, lying prone on his cot, and drifting in and out of dreams. Sometimes he fell into the snake, and he only felt cold against his belly, so that was unpleasant too. If she had been outside, basking in the sun, or going to Brazil, as his old friend at the zoo had wanted to, Harry might have at least had some warmth from that bloody creature. She was not even around people. She was only cold and angry. Falling into her gave Harry a headache. Voldemort kept her in some sort of refridgerator underground, maybe. 

Yet, she was at least a living creature, proving that life beside him existed. So he began to be grateful for the times he slipped into her.

It was one of those times, when sluggish of mind and cold of body he lay dormant in the snake, that a sliver of light cracked through an open door. His excitement and gratefulness leaked through to the snake and it hissed. The door opened wider and a young girl stood there at the top, innocent of face, as she looked at the snake in curiosity. The snake hissed and curled into the patch of warm light falling soft on the flagstones. 

Then there was a cry from further within the house, and the girl hastily shut the door tight, leaving them behind in the darkness.

Oh, dare he call a sunbeam bright ever again? 

The snake was moved. He could tell, somehow, by how he felt uneasiness in his body though he was only lying prone on his cot and biting his nails. There was that strange heaviness of Voldemort’s magic flowing through him, as it flowed through the snake. Then there was confusion, and Harry was rearing at flesh, sinking his fangs through, and venom flowed from him. 

———

When he woke, there was Voldemort standing over his cot. Voldemort’s chest was heavily bandaged and his breathing was drawn. Harry sat up and leaned back against the wall, trying to put distance between them, though he was so wretchedly glad to see a living being close, though he craved to touch Voldemort to feel contact, to feel that there was a world outside. 

“The snake is messed up,” he muttered. “She attacked you.” 

Voldemort did not reply. He perused the cell carefully and then asked, “Why are you falling into her? Her mind is unstable. She is an animal. Possession works differently. You may get stuck there, with no one being the wiser.” 

Liar. “You will know.” 

“My question stands.” 

“She is alive. She is not here.” Harry did not offer further explanation. 

So it surprised him when understanding dawned on Voldemort’s face, and he said slowly, “You are lonely.” 

Harry glared at him. 

“I suppose it is understandable. It has been a few weeks,” Voldemort said, as if to himself.

Harry laughed at that, and it was a hysterical laugh that reminded him uneasily, sadly, of the man in the other cell. Was he going spare too? 

“I am not without mercy,” Voldemort said carefully. “I have been in similar circumstances, Harry. I tended to possess snakes in those times.”

He had been in Albania, Dumbledore had said. Harry waited, frightened, for a harkback to Godric’s Hollow, to Voldemort’s fall, to what Harry had wrought unwittingly. Voldemort did not say anything more.

Hastily, wanting to change the subject, wanting to keep Voldemort there because he was alive and present, he asked, “Is the old man doing all right?” 

Had he been stupid in asking about the old man’s welfare? Would Voldemort now use that against him? Of course, he would. 

“He enquired after you,” Voldemort said derisively. “It seems you have managed to make a stranger care for your welfare in a short span of time, as always. Try not to get him to die for you.”

Even having a living being in close proximity did not matter then. Harry closed his eyes and did not say anything more, unwilling to let the tears fall, unwilling to let his rage and grief show. They had died for him, yes. Worse than that, they had been killed. How was he to blame for their deaths more than their murderer? 

“Do you know who he is?” 

“No.” 

“His regard for your beloved Headmaster was born in a time of gold. It was divine and his lover was unjustifiably blessed to be able to bask in it. Unfortunately, the reciprocation was born here, in these lands, amidst blood, torment, tears, fall and shame. It is wholly of this unforgiving earth and he suffers everyday on that account, and he will have no reprieve even after the end.”

Harry opened his eyes wide, shocked by the mocking in Voldemort’s words, shocked by the choice of words. 

“Gellert Grindelwald, Harry,” Voldemort said quietly. “Dumbledore sealed him here, with love that bordered hate, and broke his lover’s magic with his own, and he is a thrall of the stones he once wrought with chant and sorcery.” 

———

When he woke next, there was large bars instead of the solid wall across him, and through them he saw the old man in the adjoining cell, watching him steadily. He had forgotten how unnerving the man’s stare was. 

“Awake, little prince?”

“Grindelwald.” 

Harry sat up and watched the man carefully, for traces of the Dark Lord that Dumbledore had once defeated. 

“What gave me away?” the man asked, laughing, and his visage was improved not a jot by his merriment. 

Had not that Dark Lord been said to be handsome? Hermione had said that. Many people had said that. 

“Dumbledore put you here,” Harry said softly. “So he knows how to get here. He knows how to rescue…us.”

“Doll, he sealed me here,” the man said pityingly. Harry felt foolish. He knew that was true. Yet, how could he say that Dumbledore would only save him? 

“He knows how to get here,” Harry said, trusting fiercely in that. Once Dumbledore knew where Harry was held, nothing Voldemort did could stop the rescue. 

“This is the only ground he cannot breach,” Grindelwald told him flatly. “As long as I live, the enchantment can only be broken if he loves me as much as he did when he sealed me here.” 

It was odd to hear this old, wretched man speak of Dumbledore and love. It made Harry uncomfortable. Grindelwald must have seen that, because he laughed his ugly laugh again, and said, “Sweet prince, how innocent you are!”

He was not. Privet Drive had seen to that. He did not say anything, though. He was thinking about what Grindelwald had said about the enchantment. Dumbledore had sealed him with love. Voldemort had said something about both love and hate in equal measure. If anything, Harry had learned from Hermione that magic sometimes interpreted these matters in a different way than the casters intended. He had to think. 

How had Voldemort managed to gain custody of the castle then? He wanted to ask the old man, but the old man was Grindelwald. How could he trust? 

“You have beautiful eyes,” the man said. “Reminds me of a doe I slaughtered in the Carpathians in my youth.” 

Harry flinched, and the man laughed again. 

“Why are you trying to make me scared?” he asked, angry at having fallen for the obvious tactic. “You are stuck here. I am stuck here too. We should get along.” 

“So like Albus you are,” the old man snarled in vicious satisfaction. “He used to be like you, before he realised it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He wisened up quickly.” 

Harry did not say anything.

“Oh, thinks he is clever, doesn’t he? Bastard. Putting us together. Putting me here to face an exact replica of the old temptation. I won’t fall for that again. I won’t!”

Harry pressed his palms into his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. 

———

When he woke again, the old man was singing in a harsh language. Harry cradled himself and watched him sing.

“You hiss in your sleep.” 

He had fallen into the snake again. The snake was raging. Had Voldemort neutralised that venom in time? Those bandages had looked serious. 

Had he used the same potion that Snape had brewed for Arthur? Did Snape brew it for him too? Where was Dumbledore searching for him? Did the Death Eaters know that Harry was captive?

“Who is Vernon?” 

“What?” Harry asked, jolted out of his thoughts. 

“You beg him prettily in your sleep, little prince,” the old man said, leering. “Gave your sweet, ripe mouth his cock, did he?” 

The old man stopped leering, stopped talking, and looked startled for once, when Harry threw up his daily soup immediately at the thought. He dabbed his mouth with his dirty sleeve and shook his head tiredly, before picking up the pitcher and drinking a gulp of water. 

The old man’s company was a boon. It kept him from going spare. It caused problems too. Like this. Also, having to do his ablutions while listening to perverted comments that made him wince and flinch and blush did not help. He wondered if that had been in Voldemort’s plan. He doubted it. Voldemort’s head was a familiar place to Harry, and as creepy as Voldemort’s thoughts often could be, sex was not a big feature in his revenge and torture schemes. Crucio was about as imaginative as he got. 

“Vernon is my aunt’s husband,” Harry told the old man, primarily because he expected that shocked, aghast look which came his way. 

Good, no more questions about that from then on. Harry wanted to ensure that. If he was going to be here for the rest of his unfortunate life, however long or short that may be, he did not want to hear about Vernon one more time. 

“Albus won’t have allowed that!” the man said then, fiercely, full of conviction. 

It was the first time Harry had seen spark or life to that living corpse, outside salacious comments about him. 

“If he could seal you up here with _love_ , he is capable of a lot,” Harry muttered, though he knew that was unfair to Dumbledore. 

That got him no answer. It felt viciously good to have the last word for once. 

He was about to try and fall asleep, when the old man croaked, "A thrall to kill, a knave to save, a knight on crusade." 

Harry wanted to ask what that was about, but he decided that could wait for when he woke next. He was not going anywhere. Neither was the old man. 

—————————————


	2. Of God's creation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry bonds with Grindelwald over some common acquaintances, in which Voldemort substitutes chicken with lamb

“Do you know what day it is?” 

Grindelwald cackled. 

“Do you know what month it is? Do you know whether it is night or day?” Harry asked, desperate to know. Was it still summer outside? Had Hermione started complaining about the cold? Had Ron’s freckles faded? 

“What is a day, a month, a year, if not markers imposed by humans in their obsession with needing to explain why the sun came up and why the seasons turned?” Grindelwald asked him lazily. “Here we are, and what do we care about the sun or the seasons? We care only about our daily meal, sweet prince.”

He began measuring time in terms of bowls of chicken soup. 

———

“How do you pass the time?” 

“I watch your sweet, nubile body,” Grindelwald told him, with frightening honesty. “I watch it when you are awake, and when you sleep, and as you thrash in your deepest dreams, I wonder what it would be like to cover every inch of you with my hands and mouth. Are you going to buck and rear as strong as Albus did, I wonder? He was finer than any stallion bred, I remember. You fare not too shabbily. You have something he never did, sweet prince. You have innocence. How would it be to rip that from you?”

Harry felt the chicken soup revolt at that confession. He gritted his teeth and muttered, “My uncle ripped all of that long ago. And I was only asking what you did before, before you had me to torment with your stupid sex fantasies.”

“There is more than stupidity in sex, doll.” Grindelwald’s eyes were cold and knowing, and Harry saw what the victims of a Dark Lord once had seen. He saw cruelty and knowledge twisted together to bloom vicious in that gaze. 

“Sex magic?” Harry scoffed, refusing to be frightened. 

He had heard silly tales of that from Fred and George. The only topics that the twins and Hermione condemned with equal viciousness were sex magic and prophecy. They did not believe in that sort of claptrap. Really, how could having sex unleash lots of magic? Harry had to admit that it did not make a great deal of sense. 

“Such innocence, Harry Potter. And they say that you are his soul.” 

“He has about as much to do with sex as I do,” Harry muttered, rolling his eyes. 

Surely, if there was such a thing as sex magic, then Voldemort would have slept with Dumbledore or with Flamel long ago. From the scandalous talk in the Order that Mrs. Weasley had tried to shield them from, to little avail thanks to Dung and his drunken chatter, it was clearly known that Voldemort was a sexless fiend who got off only on his Crucios. 

“What did you do, before?” Harry asked again, wanting to know, curious, desperate. 

He was going insane there, he thought. Sometimes, Grindelwald stared at him, and said nothing when Harry asked questions. Sometimes, Grindelwald turned away and lay prone for what seemed like days. Harry fretted over him, if only because he did not want to be more alone than he already was. 

He had schooled himself to stop thinking too much about rescue, about Dumbledore, about the outside world. He told himself that it was only like summer at the Dursleys, without the hard labour, without the starvation, and without Vernon’s particular brand of affection. He told himself that he would be back with Ron and Hermione soon, as soon as September came. It was not too bad when he cast it that way. 

“I talk to the stones, doll.” 

Harry glared at him.

Grindelwald took pity then, and he said quietly, “In a manner that is not uncommon to those who have wielded magic to build homes, I too have a particular kinship with these stones that I wrought of chant and blood. Perhaps that has made my long residence here kinder, and perhaps that is why Albus chose to imprison me here. If he had to shut me away, he had at least the kindness and the cleverness to shut me away in a prison of my own making, a prison that I loved, a prison where the stones knew me by magic and soul.” 

Harry chewed on that uncomfortably. Was that similar to how Hogwarts had its own kind of magic that it sometimes unveiled to particular people? Had Dumbledore made the right decision, all those years ago, when trapping Grindelwald here? How could he have known back then? Was there even any precedent for that? He thought usually victors killed the defeated in battle, especially if there were Dark Lords involved. 

Maybe it was something to do with the weird story Grindelwald liked talking about. Harry could not call it a love story. That seemed just wrong to him. There had been something though, between Dumbledore and him. It made Harry uncomfortable just to think about it, but he knew it had been there. 

—————

And then, perhaps akin to a month marker, happened something eventful that jolted him out of his restless sleep where he sought to find warmth and violence in a snake’s body on flagstones old. He had been her, and had been hunting a mouse, and then he had been thrown out, or perhaps seized away. Blearily, he opened his eyes and stared at the stone where there had been only bars. Grindelwald!

He sat up and looked at the solid wall, wondering what had happened. Had Voldemort finally returned to off one of them? He got to his feet, alarmed. Surely, Death could only come for him. Why would Voldemort try to kill Grindelwald now, after many bowls of chicken soup, when he could have done away with his decrepit, foul-mouthed prisoner long ago? 

Did he want to keep Grindelwald alive? It must be his saving people stuff, that Hermione complained about, half-heartedly. He missed her dearly right then, as he stood there hoping that it was only his reckoning, that it was only his time to return to his parents beloved and to poor, mad Sirius. 

Then the stones called him again. Perhaps he would be spared looking death in the face if he was in the snake’s body. Perhaps the possessed snake too would die, and Voldemort would be down by two horcruxes. Only, it wasn’t the stones on which the snake’s belly slithered that had seized him. It was the stones of the castle. 

Suddenly fascinated, he sank back onto the cot, wanting to see where they would take him, wanting to see. He was frightened, but slipping into the snake had probably made him stupidly willing to risk. 

So there he was, and he was sweat and bone, and he was flesh and blood, and he was man guttural and visceral, as he clawed at warmth and fear. Shocked, repulsed, he reared back, and the man above him stilled in realization.

——

“You had best forget that,” Voldemort told him, looking quite irked and perturbed, as he stood before Harry.

Harry nodded, and could not take his eyes off the gouges on Voldemort’s wrist, where he had clasped tight, where Grindelwald’s nails had raked through flesh. Delicate, was the word that came to Harry’s mind when he saw the red scratches on the thin wrist. 

“This possession tendency of yours needs to be reined in,” Voldemort ordered. “The snake is not long for this world. Neither is Grindelwald or his castle. You may find yourself screaming, dispossessed.” 

Voldemort probably knew all about that. 

“I am not long for this world either,” Harry said mullishly, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of acquiescence. 

Voldemort did not grace that with an answer. Unlike most everyone Harry had dealt with before, Voldemort’s ability to resist the bait was remarkable. Even Grindelwald, clever and crooked though he was, proved himself weak when it came to getting riled up Harry’s teenage moments. Teenagers, as Mrs. Weasley lamented often, were sometimes worse than Dark Lords, when it came to petty cruelty and mullish sarcasm. 

Then, because Voldemort was not leaving, Harry asked, “Will you rape me like that too?”

He wanted to add that it was what Muggle villains did, but he resisted that because he liked his chicken soup. Dying here was bad enough. He shuddered when he imagined dying here of starvation. 

Voldemort’s face twisted in spite and horror, and he said nothing for a long moment, before he composed himself and said, “If I were to rape my prisoners, I would at least pick ones better bred and attired.” 

Gaslighting. Harry did not say anything. Voldemort had built his life out of lying and gaslighting. 

Later, when the bars appeared again, Grindelwald was there, fuming. 

“I hadn’t meant to,” Harry muttered, knowing that changed nothing. 

“You wretch!” Grindelwald shouted, and his voice was hoarse in his anger, and spittle flew through the bars that separated them. 

Not for the first time, Harry was glad for the bars. Grindelwald was a scary, demented man. Yet, loneliness was worse. 

“I am sorry!” Harry shouted back, and there were tears suddenly on his cheeks. 

He wondered why. Was he sorry for Grindelwald? Was he sorry that he was captive in bloody Nurmengard, in a castle Dumbledore had sealed with love? Dumbledore had sealed Harry at the Dursleys, too, and that had been out of love as well. 

Love- 

“How did Voldemort gain control of your castle?” Harry asked, fiercely rubbing away his tears, striding to the bars, gripping Grindelwald’s bony wrist with his young, strong fingers. Oh, what madness had seized him? 

Grindewald laughed his ugly laugh then, speckling Harry’s face with spit, and he muttered, “Oh, sweet prince! Sweet, innocent prince!” 

“Tell me!” Harry roared, not caring that he was transgressing boundaries that he could not restore, not caring that it was none of his bloody business, not caring that, in the end, Grindelwald was only an old man who deserved to die in as much peace as he could grab. 

“He opened me just as Albus sealed me,” Grindelwald said, and his mottled skin turned crimson in shame. “With love.” Saying so, he tugged his hand away, and walked back to the farthest corner from Harry. There he lagged against the stone walls and sunk down into a huddle that refused to grace Harry with word or glance. 

And suddenly Harry understood why Voldemort had looked taken aback by the accusation of rape. Oh, it was still nonconsensual and fucked up, but it was with love. How had Voldemort been capable of such a feat? 

He felt bile rise in his throat as he realised just how Dumbledore had sealed Grindelwald here. He closed his eyes tight and counted to ten, until his heart settled.

When he got back to Hermione, after this summer which was just like any other summer at the Dursleys, he would tell her that sex magic had its uses. 

How had Voldemort managed to love Grindelwald, just enough, to open the castle and to claim it, to open Grindelwald and to claim him? Was it a love potion? It had to be, to be so exact, to be so correct. How had Voldemort known Dumbledore’s secret? 

Oh, and Dumbledore. Harry had watched Dumbledore over the years, loving and hateful, strong and weak, prideful and humble, serving and leading. Oh, oh, poor, wretched Dumbledore. How had he faced young ten-year-olds each September, knowing what he had done? How had he pulled himself up to lead another cause? 

Sometimes, Harry had thought that Dumbledore was a man who craved death, a man who dared death to claim him, a man who wanted an ending long denied. This, maybe, was the reason why. 

———

“I will die here,” Harry told Grindelwald, wondering if the old man was even listening. 

Two bowls of soup had come and gone. Grindelwald had not stirred from his comatose position in the farthest corner from Harry. 

Initially, Harry had let him be. He had not a clue what to say, or how to make things all right between them again. He had needed time to process it all. 

Then, after the first bowl, he had started fretting. It was really unlike Grindelwald to miss a meal. After the second, Harry was frantic with anxiety. He had said several crazy comments, to get Grindelwald to tell him off, to call him a sweet, stupid doll, but nothing had worked so far. 

“I will die here!” he shouted again, to the old man who refused to stir. “Don’t worry about it. I will take your secret to my grave, if I even get a grave.”

They both missed the third bowl of soup. Harry lay on his cot, listening to the shallow, rattling breaths from the next cell, and he rubbed his eyes fiercely in helplessness. 

Then he made one of his foolhardy decisions, in a lifetime of foolhardy decisions. He breathed deep and shut out everything. He was sad stone, and he was mad snake. He was lifeless, and he was a lowlife. He reached out, clasping, yearning, demanding, until he hit his memories of the Department of Mysteries. It hurt him, to remember what Voldemort had planted in his head. It broke his heart to remember what had befallen Sirius there, and to remember what Harry had wanted to rescue Sirius from in the first place. Yet, were they his memories? They were the works of another mind, tied to his own. He remembered them, again and again, until Voldemort turned aware of what he was doing. 

When he felt hands roughly shaking him awake, he was in a pool of sweat and tears and urine, and he hiccuped as he seized Voldemort’s wrists to keep him there. 

“Your favorite hobby is less than wholesome,” Voldemort announced, wrinkling his nose at the sight and the smell, at Harry’s snivelling, before he wrested a hand away to bring his wand to sort Harry out, to restore cleanliness and sanity. He bent over to extract the pitcher of water and placed it on Harry’s lap. 

“He hasn’t said a word since you left,” Harry whispered, looking through the bars where still lay huddled Grindelwald in a pile of limbs and rags. “He hasn’t eaten, or drank.”

Was he even breathing? Harry could not discern the telltale rise and fall of his chest. Maybe his eyesight was worsening. He gulped down the water hastily. Voldemort grabbed the pitcher before it crashed at their feet, and instead brought a steaming bowl of soup. 

“It smells different,” Harry croaked suspiciously. 

“Lamb,” Voldemort explained. “Now sit quiet and finish your soup.”

“Is he alive?” 

“The castle is standing, isn’t it?” Voldemort asked laconically, not sounding too perturbed. “Now, if you summon me here in such a precipitous manner again, I will be very displeased.” 

Fuck him. Harry kept his eyes on the soup. Then he took a deep breath and said, “He is stuck here until he dies, isn’t he?” 

“Sealed alive by Albus Dumbledore in a tomb of love,” Voldemort helpfully explained. 

Merlin and Nimue. Harry shook his head to forget that. Then he plodded on, “Can we be in the same cell?” 

They stared at each other for a long while. Then Voldemort asked, picking his words with care, “Do you know what he wants from you?” 

Vernon had wanted worse, hadn’t he? And Harry was only as powerless as Grindelwald. He nodded bravely. 

“Why?” 

He didn’t care to be alone, not anymore. He ached of loneliness. Now he understood why many Muggle lawmakers called solitary confinement torture. He wanted to touch and hold a living being. He could have settled for a kneazle, honestly, but he had only Grindelwald. 

———-

So when the bars came down, when Voldemort left, Harry took his half-full bowl of soup and trudged across to Grindelwald’s limp form. 

“I know you were listening,” Harry said quietly. “Please say something.” 

“My idiot prince,” Grindelwald said, coughing. 

Harry took a deep breath, thought happy thoughts, of Hermione slapping Malfoy hard, and knelt beside the old man. He ladled the soup and brought it to broken lips. 

“My sweet, stupid boy. I will desecrate you until Albus begs me to kill you.” 

“Have some soup,” Harry said, daring to place his fingers on the clammy brow of the old man. He looked at the grotesque visage and asked softly, “Do you think I am not scared? We are going to die here, both of us.” 

Grindelwald shook his head, and took the ladle from Harry’s fingers, slurped down the soup messily as his throat reflexes failed him after his long fast. Harry eased him down. At first contact, when Harry’s hands brushed his shoulders, Grindelwald lurched into his embrace, clumsily and greedily, and Harry tried his best not to flinch away.

“Scared, my little prince?” 

“It is okay,” he whispered, though his voice was taut and thin. “I don’t mind.”

Grindelwald laughed, and then wept, and collapsed into Harry’s form stricken. 

“What is it?” Harry asked numbly, not knowing what to do.

Hermione would have accused him of having an emotional range of a teaspoon. He gulped and brought his left hand to Grindelwald’s scalp, and wove it through the limp, matted locks of grey hair. 

“My son was only a few years older than you when I saw him last,” Grindelwald said, broken. “Once he had been the gold in my life, in him there had been perfection that had eluded every other making of mine, and when Albus held him hostage, I gave up my wand and war, men and castle, magic and might.” 

Harry held him tighter, not knowing what to say. Wars had to ended by decisive action, to stop the senseless casualties and collateral damage. Grindelwald had committed genocide in Europe. Thousands had died in his path of cruelty. Dumbledore had stopped him. Why, then, did this story of personal tragedy still hurt to hear? 

“Did you-”

“I saw him once before I was sealed here,” Grindelwald muttered. “He was my little prince, who had asked me to tell him the tales of the Magyar. He was my brave soldier, who knew the Himnusz by heart. He was fierce and strong, good and kind, and everything I was not. This craven half-life of mine matters not when I think of what I spared…at least until the bastard came to claim the castle.”

Harry sensed the deep resentment and fear in Grindelwald’s voice and bearing then. 

“What did Voldemort do?” 

Did he take the son hostage, as Dumbledore had? Had he tortured the poor man? 

“I bound myself to a master to spare my son once. I bound myself to another to kill my son.”

Harry clutched him tighter as he wept again, disconsolately. 

“You must be the most wretched of all of God’s creatures,” Grindelwald said, through his sobs. “Our keeper will lose his war, I will die soon, and you will be here incarcerated for the rest of your life, until you starve to death. ”

“Dumbledore-” Harry began defensively, scared. Starving to death was beginning to loom in his mind as the worst fate possible. 

“Dumbledore has never lost a war, doll. And he has never been able to save anyone he loved.”

Harry thought of Ariana, of Grindelwald, of Sirius, of Lily and James, and of the poor Longbottoms. 

Grindelwald's hands came then to cradle Harry close, and he went willingly, despite the fears that rose rank in his heart. It was only another summer at the Dursleys, after all. 

"I won't have you, doll," Grindelwald said then, and there was grimness in his voice. "Not even if you asked me to." 

Harry did not know much about religions or gods. He thought still, that Grindelwald had said something eerily true, when he had called Harry the most wretched of God's creations. And then it was Harry's turn to weep. 

—————————————


	3. And then came the beasts

He fell into the snake again, and she was vicious, twisting fiercely about a man’s torso, and his screams were blood-curdling, and Harry felt sick. He stayed though, enthralled by her warm, present cruelty, enthralled by the feel of human skin against scales, and he exulted with her as ribs snapped like bird-bones against her powerful muscles.

Then footsteps scrambled towards them, towards their dance of glory, and Voldemort shouted a spell, and the snake snarled at him. Her coils slithered away from her victim as she sped towards Voldemort, her rage curdling through her blood, through Harry’s blood.

Voldemort’s wand-tip flashed green, for a fraction of a second, before his eyes flared in realisation, and it was too late, because the snake was angry, and Harry drunk of her anger, and Voldemort’s body was so fragile underneath her massiveness.

“Crucio!” Voldemort shouted, and his command over that spell was legendary; battered, the snake fell away, thrashing on the cold stones. The pain dug knives into Harry’s mind, and he screamed, and Voldemort screamed with him.

When Harry woke, Grindelwald had his head cradled in his gnarly hands, and was softly singing to him.

Somewhere a wolf howled. Harry thought of Remus, amidst his tears of pain and fright. And the wolf howled again. Rationality claimed his shaken nerves and he stuttered, “Close!”

“Yes, the wolves have breached the castle,” Grindelwald said, grinning, and the missing teeth made his grin diabolic.

Harry tried to sit up, and the wolf howled again, and another joined its howl to that, and another, and another. Just as Harry was about to ask Grindelwald for an explanation, yellow eyes gleamed through the darkness outside their cell. Many pairs of yellow eyes.

Grindelwald howled to them.

Harry clutched his hands tight over his eyes, trying to shut all of it away, and mercifully, he lost consciousness. The last he saw was a snout pushed through the bars of the cell.

——-

When he came to, he was on his cot, and there was blood seeping into the cell. He shuddered. The door was open. Frightened, he sat up. Had Grindelwald somehow been able to get out? The wolves!

And overcoming his fear for Grindelwald’s life was another sensation - a sensation of being left behind. Death did not matter, did it, as much as being left behind did? Enough people had left him behind.

Then his scar hurt. He coughed and threw up, and glared at the drying blood at the edges of the bars.

There was a faint rustle, and Voldemort stepped from the darkness into the light, and the flickering torchlight made him look paler than his wont, and Harry could not find fear in him, though he knew he needed to fear.

“Stay out of that snake!” Voldemort snapped, though he did not look optimistic in his command. He had bruises on his knuckles, and Harry knew that the snake had been vicious to her master.

“I don't try to go into her. It just happens. Where are the wolves?” Harry asked. “Where is Grindelwald?”

“First, the snake. Now he worries about wolves. Soon you can be the star of your own Jungle Book,” Voldemort snarled, before striding across to him, in a flurry of restrained rage, and he shoved his palm flat against Harry’s scar.

Harry wished it burned him. It didn’t. How could it? The protection had been nullified long ago, on that wretched day when Cedric had begged him to take his body back.

“You should do something about the wolves,” he said tiredly, bracing himself against the stone wall behind him. “Where is Grindelwald?”

“I killed the wolves.”

That explained the blood.

“Where is Grindelwald?” Harry asked again.

He had all the time in the world, didn’t he? He had all the time, until Voldemort decided to kill him. He could ask and ask again.

An expression of hesitancy flickered across Voldemort’s face. Then he said in a voice that brooked no argument, “I moved him.”

Sex. It was that weird sex ritual thing that they had going on. Harry blushed and looked at the crusting blood. Wolves slaughtered. Snake still alive. Grindelwald and Voldemort having their weird castle-possession ritual.

“I brought you soup,” Voldemort said then, and handed him a bowl of chicken soup.

“I don’t think having sex with him is helping,” Harry said quietly, looking at Voldemort’s bruised knuckles, willing to say hurtful, offensive words, if only it earned a reprieve from everything. Even the pain of earlier, when he had been in the snake, had felt like life. He wanted to feel alive.

Voldemort did not reply.

“The wolves were able to get in,” Harry went on recklessly. “That possession is failing.”

Why did he have to bring it up? Ron would have kept his mouth shut and kept that secret to build a strategy of escape. Harry knew why he had said that. He could rationalize why, at least. He was in Voldemort’s head, and Voldemort was in his head, and there wasn’t a lot they could hide from each other for a long time. Just look at that wretched snake.

“You love Grindelwald, don't you?” Voldemort asked, and the word love was uttered with his usual scorn. “Think he is as your beloved Headmaster.”

Harry frowned at that. Grindelwald was nothing like Dumbledore. Harry was admittedly slipping into insanity, but he was not that confused yet.

“Think of this, then.” Voldemort grinned at him, and it was an unpleasant grin. “Think of this, Harry. After Albus Dumbledore, your dear Grindelwald picks another unsuitable candidate.”

Harry glanced up at Voldemort. There was something in Voldemort’s eyes that betrayed discomfort. And Harry remembered Grindelwald’s reaction that day. And many of the pieces slotted into place.

“He was fucking his exemplary son,” Voldemort informed him, sounding rather like that Tory news broadcaster Vernon liked. “Once it took the love of Albus Dumbledore to take possession of him, and of his castle. And then-”

“And then, you possessed his son, somehow, and it took that for you to conquer the castle,” Harry finished bitterly.

“Yes,” Voldemort said lazily, reaching to brush away specks of dust from his robes.

Voldemort was a liar. Dumbledore had warned everyone about that. Harry knew this was not a lie. He knew it somehow. It was that gut instinct Hermione shirked away from. It used to save him, once upon a time. Then again, maybe it was only luck, and as anyone knew, Harry had had more than his fair share of that. He had run out.

And somewhere yet, in Voldemort’s posture and tone, was great discomfort. Why was he uncomfortable? He had needed love to claim Grindelwald, and to claim the castle. He had not shirked away from that course. He had gone about that without compunction, without heed to morality.

“Well, I prefer him alive and with me,” Harry said finally, refusing to think about all of that.

That was what he needed. Someone alive. Someone who had lasted all this. Grindelwald was batty and dangerous, but Harry had nothing else left.

What did Dumbledore think of Harry these days? Was there a rescue mission somewhere? Did Vernon fess up to anyone? What did it matter? As Grindelwald had said, Harry was in the one place beyond Dumbledore’s reach.

 

——-

When Harry woke, he woke to sharpness and cold. It was different from the snake’s raging warmth. It was different from Voldemort’s own tapestry of bleakness and malice. It was sharp and cold.

“Harry!” screamed Luna, and she was looking at a mirror, as Alice once had, and on her head was a tiara of diamonds that sparkled sharp and cold. She screamed again and tried to lift the tiara away.

Footsteps ran towards her. A Ravenclaw Prefect. They were before the Room of Requirement. Harry tried to scream, he tried to wrest words out of diamond, he tried to cast spells out of the void that had him. And out of him, a ghoul rose, sharp and cold, and there was Tom Riddle translucent, and there were faint lines of age at the corners of his eyes, and his features blurred into that of a woman sharp and cold, and Luna screamed again.

“Stand away!”

It was Minerva McGonagall. Her hands shook as she tried to cast. And there was Dumbledore behind her, solid and powerful, and there was a curious mixture of grief and apology in his old eyes as he looked upon the woman spectral, and beneath her at Tom Riddle, and beneath him where frightened stood Harry.

Luna screamed again as the tiara flew from her to Dumbledore and she was bleeding from her head. McGonagall ran to her. Dumbledore’s eyes blazed in determination as he cast a spell to contain, as he sighed and cast a spell to destroy. The fire surged, and the woman screamed, and Tom Riddle turned to look at Harry who stood small and crying, and in his eyes was a warning, and in his eyes was determination, and he pushed Harry away, sending him whirling through space and time and seams of magic old, back into his body, where he woke screaming.

“Shut up, doll,” Grindelwald crooned, stroking Harry’s hair as Hermione used to stroke her grumpy kneazle.

Harry fancied that his skin was burning, that his eyes were melting away, that he was trapped by Dumbledore’s magical fire, and his scar hurt as Voldemort grieved for his soul.

“The wolves are gone,” Harry said brokenly, once he had stopped crying.

“They will come back,” Grindelwald said. “The possession is nearly broken. My castle will be their caldera, once they have nowhere left to wreak themselves on.”

“The wolves?”

“Silly little prince,” Grindelwald said softly, and kissed Harry’s cheek.

Harry was so tired that he did not flinch. Instead he sighed and let Grindelwald card his fingers through his hair, and let Grindelwald sing him to sleep.

Later, as he lay between the stone walls and a sleeping Grindelwald, he saw yellow eyes in the dark.

The wolves were back. Their low snarling and Grindelwald’s rattling snores kept Harry awake.

He found that he could not bring himself to react, to fear, to even wake Grindelwald.

Instead, he watched them, and worried about Luna. He hoped she was all right. she had been bleeding.

He liked her. He had wanted to take care of her. She was so different from Cho, and from Ginny. He sighed. He was glad that he had never found the courage to tell her. He had been so messed up, and nobody except Ron and Hermione could have understood that. They were friends, and they had suffered greatly on his behalf. He never wished any of that on Luna.

The torch guttered away. The wolves began howling. Grindelwald stiffened beside Harry.

“It is all right,” Harry said softly. “The bars will keep them out.”

“That bloody bastard is losing the war,” Grindelwald muttered. “Let us hope that we will starve to death when he falls.”

The other outcome would be the wolves making a meal of them. Harry was sure that his flesh tasted like chicken. All that soup.

Was Voldemort really losing the war? Maybe he was. He was losing horcruxes fast. Dumbledore had known what that tiara was. He had not hesitated. He had not looked diffident. He had known exactly what to do.

That snake was unstable. Then, there was Harry.

Maybe Dumbledore was inching closer to victory. Harry tried to be happy about that. So many of his friends would have a better future when Dumbledore won. It made no difference to Harry, not anymore, because he was in a place that was beyond rescue.

“Aren’t you frightened, you foolish boy?”

Harry did not reply.

For all he knew, Grindelwald was not averse to cannibalism too. If he could fuck his own son, not much beyond that could be taboo, certainly. Harry thought of Vernon. Maybe Vernon was not that far from the norm, then. Maybe many men were like this.

He had wanted to talk about Vernon to Arthur Weasley once. His lips had sealed themselves shut when he approached Ron’s father though. He had been ashamed, and frightened. And he had wondered, as he often did, if everything that happened during the summers had happened in a dream, to another Harry.

Maybe this was another Harry too. This Harry, who would probably end up in the wolves’ bellies, or in Grindelwald’s, was not that happy Harry who was with Ron and Hermione, and who had a crush on Luna.

He was cold and damp, and there were wolves crawling over his skin, and their breath was foul. There was a furnished room, and he saw Voldemort pacing sharply, and there was fear on those alien features.

“You are falling into the stones,” Grindelwald said then, slapping him sharply twice on each cheek. “Your mind is untethered. Sweetling, you have to rein that in.”

“I don’t know how.”

Grindelwald stared at him thoughtfully, and the wolves snarled outside, and Harry saw realization come to his sharp, blue eyes. He reared back, but it was too late, as Grindelwald’s crooked fingers came to his throat. The fingers had barely touched Harry’s skin before Grindelwald fell back, with his hands melting away.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked, his voice shrill, as he attempted to follow, but Grindelwald was scuttling back, as far as he could, and there was raw fear in his eyes.

There was green outside the cell, then, and the wolves fell away mute. The bars opened to let Voldemort in. He looked irked, and he raised his wand at Grindelwald.

“No!” Harry said, panicking, and he rose from the cot.

Grindelwald was staring at Harry still. There was froth at the corners of his mouth.

“Aren’t you the most wretched of all God’s creation? There are things worse than death,” Grindelwald told Harry then, and his eyes were vacant as green wrapped his body like a shroud.

Harry fell back, as if he were a puppet with its chords cut. Voldemort turned to look down at him.

“Leave me here,” Harry whispered, no longer thinking of Luna, only thinking of Grindelwald and how he used to call Harry a stupid doll. He was stones grieving, and he was vacant inside, and life had left him, and there were ghosts of old victims deep in the castle's bowels rejoicing as they sensed Grindelwald's fate, and he laughed. Voldemort waited him out patiently.

“Leave me with the wolves.”

“I brought you soup.”

He was earth and stone, and he was snow and streams, and he was many murdered men and women, and he was Grindelwald's twisted obsessions.

"What-"

He could not even speak, without flashes of memory creeping and choking away his words.

"I told you to cease your tendency towards possession," Voldemort said desultorily, sitting beside him.

They stared at Grindelwald's corpse.

"I didn't-"

He had never possessed Grindelwald, had he? He had fallen into the stones a few times, and the first time had been when he had arisen out of Grindelwald's skin as Voldemort surged deep in him, enacting a love perverted and yet true, a love that had been enough for magic to give him rein of the castle.

"He was the stones," Voldemort said. "He was the castle."

Harry flinched. He knew what would come next.

"Don't be silly," Voldemort said briskly, getting busy with his wand, cleaning up the cell of corpse and wolf-blood. "You have the castle. I have you. Between us, what use is there in enacting possession through sex? We paid for each other, in blood and soul and magic, long ago."

Harry shook his head, and he could only think of Grindelwald, and he said harshly, "You are losing the war."

Grindelwald was dead. He had tried to kill Harry. Dumbledore had also tried to kill Harry, with Fiendfyre. Voldemort was going to fall, and Harry would starve to death. He really preferred those wolves. They would be fast and vicious. They would snap off his neck and that would be the end of it. A Killing Curse was preferable, but he did not see Voldemort offering that. Voldemort was not going to harm him as long as he was a horcrux.

"I am going to let you have free run of the castle," Voldemort said then, standing up and dusting off his robes meticulously.

Harry stared at him.

Voldemort nodded at the bowl of soup and left the cell. The bars did not come back to trap Harry.

——


	4. The laws of the gods cannot rule the passions of our hearts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry surveys his dominion, in which Dumbledore picks up some new jewelry, in which Voldemort explains risk mitigatory measures.
> 
> [warnings - incest]

Harry did not stir from his crumpled position on the narrow cot. He knew he was trembling, though it was not cold. He was sweating, though it was not hot. Voldemort’s charms were perfect at regulating air circulation and conditioning. The Muggle air-conditioner industry would have hired him eagerly, if they knew.

Perfection, indeed, had been Tom Riddle, and it still ran in Voldemort’s blood, even if that blood had been cheapened by Harry’s own. Harry laughed hysterically and ran his hands over his face in tiredness. What did perfection earn in this broken world? Voldemort was losing his war. He had killed Grindelwald. And he had lost the castle to Harry, just as he had lost his soul long ago to Harry. Harry took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and behind his eyelids rose ghosts spectral of another Dark Lord’s genocide. He rested his head against the cold stones, the stones that had been his undoing. He fancied, frightened, that he would be as Grindelwald if he had a mirror to see himself, more earth and corpse than man. 

He inspected his nails. They were jagged and dirt lay thick beneath them. He inspected his wrists. They had filled out. Voldemort kept him better fed than the Dursleys ever had. He took off his dirty shirt and looked at the thick mat of chest hair that covered him. He remembered Grindelwald’s lewd comments. He sighed and thought of Luna with a tiara on her head, a tiara that had made her scream his name, a tiara that Dumbledore had destroyed. Riddle had shielded him. A horcrux had willingly met destruction to shield another. He thought of Riddle, long of limbs and neck, sharp of gaze and spare of form, cold and full of purpose. 

His mind wafted away, from Riddle’s thin lips, from Luna’s curls of gold, from Dumbledore’s sad face and steady hand, from Grindelwald’s fingers around his throat. His mind wafted away into the darkness, past the wolves that whined in hunger, past the rats that scurried over the dirty flagstones, past the large cisterns that lay empty, past the torch-posts that were rusted over, past stone and earth, past bones and skulls, and burst like Fawkes birthing from ashes, flying over ramparts, and he sighed in ecstasy as he saw the moon and the river, the mountains high and the forests old. 

It was winter. 

He reared back in fright and horror, and wept alone. He could not delude himself about all of this just being another summer at the Dursleys, soon to be forgotten as he went back to Hogwarts, to protectors strong and friends beloved. 

He must have cried himself to sleep, because he came to in a shack, and he was pressed down by griefs and pettiness old. He remembered the language of serpents, he remembered an ugly girl who had been besotted with a handsome man who lived in the manor in the village, and he remembered Azkaban. He remembered pride and skill, and magic sublime, and he was one of the Founders old.

“A great deal of history indeed,” whispered a well-known, dear voice. 

He was only a ring in a shack, and he was still worthy of Dumbledore’s penetrating gaze. 

“You should leave, my dear boy,” Dumbledore entreated him. “I would not wish to harm you.” 

Harry tried to speak, but he was only an object, and he was encircled by jewel and metal. Why, then, was Dumbledore interested? With a sad sigh, Dumbledore drew his wand, and Harry recognized the wand now, and possession stirred in him. The wand was his, as the Castle was. Dumbledore’s gaze betrayed curiosity and confusion, but he was only a man, despite everything he had done, so he did not sense past Harry’s presence to where he was, to what he had become.

“I will find you, my boy,” Dumbledore promised softly. “I know that you are unharmed. It was foolish of you to run away from Privet Drive, but perhaps in your place another might have done the same. Wherever you are, I will find you and bring you back home to us. You must be concealed in the Muggle world, we think. Stay where you are. The war is coming to a head. It is for the best, I think, that you are far away from all of this.”

Harry listened to that with increasing incredulity. Run away from Privet Drive? Had Dumbledore no spies? Had Voldemort managed to hide the traces so effectively? Then he remembered what Grindelwald had said about Castle. Sealed by love, sealed even to Dumbledore. Vernon would not have given away the truth, of course, that he had abandoned Harry in a copse of trees. And Petunia, whatever her suspicions might have been, would hardly have brought them up. 

“You must leave now, my dear Harry,” Dumbledore whispered. “Wake up. It is only a dream.”

The chant was old and powerful, and Dumbledore’s voice did not waver. Something rose in the ring, older than Harry, and Harry sensed the curse before Dumbledore did. 

Dumbledore’s screaming was loud and prolonged. His hand was rotting away, from the fingers upwards. There was a man shouting from outside then, and then Snape hurried in, casting strong enchantments to protect and contain, and it was Snape who lifted the ring with magic and forced it on Dumbledore’s withered fingers. Dumbledore was still screaming in anguish, and trying to wrest the ring off. 

“Keep it on, you foolish man!” Snape shouted. “The curse will kill you immediately otherwise!” 

“He is still here!” Dumbledore said with effort, and cast a spell with the Deathstick upon the ring, and beside Harry woke a presence familiar and strong, and Harry tried to wake up, but he could not. He was caught in the spellfire, and dark swirls of magic coated him inside and out, and he suffocated. 

He was woken up by a sharp slap to his face. He realized that there were tears streaming down his face. He was shaking from fever, and he had soiled the cot. Embarrassment broke through the shards of pain that assailed him. Then he saw Voldemort was trembling too, discomposed and suffering. 

“He took the soul,” Harry whispered. 

“He destroyed the soul,” Voldemort corrected him in a hoarse, broken voice, and cleared his throat, trying to attain composure. 

Was Dumbledore all right? Harry shuddered as he remembered the hand withering away. Snape had been there. Whatever Harry thought of Snape, that dratted man was competent. 

“You should start worrying about your welfare, instead of his,” Voldemort said faintly. “You would have died there if I had not been able to retrieve you.”

“How?” Harry tried to calm his heaving body with deep breaths. He tried to sit up, wincing as he smelled the urine and felt the clothes sticking damp to his thighs. “How? I was here.”

“When you possess something, your soul enters the container,” Voldemort said. “As I have warned you on multiple occasions, that tendency of yours will be your death one day.” 

It was dark and Harry could see little of Voldemort’s face. Stricken still by all that he had seen, he reached out blindly to touch Voldemort’s cheek, and felt moisture. Voldemort slapped his wrist away. 

The pain had shredded Harry. He wondered, with a shudder, how it must have felt for Voldemort. The death of your soul, multiple times. Harry felt horrified. 

For the life of him, he could not understand why he reached out again, to touch Voldemort’s cheek again, and soft came his stupid words.

“I am so sorry.” 

Voldemort did not slap his hand away again. He moved away from the cot. Then he cleared his throat and cast spells to make Harry clean and unsoiled again. He brought the pitcher to Harry’s empty hands, and Harry drank without thought. 

“Pain is one of the temporary side-effects of this method of risk mitigation,” Voldemort said carefully. 

Risk mitigation? Was that what he called splitting his soul with murder? 

And then Harry realized something else. 

“You can’t keep me in the cell,” he said frankly. “You lied about letting me have the run of the castle. You cannot stop me doing that anyway.” 

Voldemort did not reply. He bristled at being called a liar, but he did not throw a Cruciatus Harry’s way. 

How could he? The Castle was Harry’s, whatever that meant. Voldemort did not look terribly worried by that. 

“Because I am yours,” Harry said bitterly. He could not hurt Voldemort even if the power was his, here, among these old stones.

“I did not ask for this,” Voldemort said dryly. “It was far from my mind when I set out to murder you in your crib.” 

Harry remembered Dumbledore’s withered fingers, he remembered Grindelwald’s tale about his son.

“Perhaps fate and destiny are stronger than us all,” Voldemort mused. “Perhaps there are Gods above or beneath or tucked away somewhere safely, and they know we shall not abase ourselves before them, unless we were brought low, often and harshly.” 

Harry had not really thought about Gods, but he supposed even if he had, he would have written them off quickly enough after he had been locked away in cupboards, after he had watched Sirius fall, after Cedric dying, after seeing so many tragedies unfold and snuff kind people out like they were tallow candles. God worked for Petunia and suburban families, and had not really taken much interest in orphans. 

“That is a revelation,” Voldemort said. “Who would have thought that the Savior himself would not believe in powers above, in Gods?”

“You don’t know me,” Harry said tiredly, and wondered why he bothered to say that. 

“That is adolescence bursting through. Blood and magic should be sufficient to know another, I daresay,” Voldemort said lazily. 

“If that was the case, you would know your father as well,” Harry pointed out sharply. He was not afraid, not here, in a place that had ceded him possession, in a time where he was only a ghost to the world outside. “You would know stupid Wormtail as well.”

Voldemort’s amusement flitted away, and he looked pale with anger. Harry squared his shoulders and stared at him. He had always been terrified of Voldemort, for all that everyone called him brave. That had changed. What more could Voldemort do to him? He understood why Grindelwald had been so nonchalant. 

Then Voldemort’s features took on a calculating mien, and he reached out to place his hand splayed over Harry’s chest, as if on the verge of clawing his heart out, and he said, “Remember that you are more to me. Remember that you are my soul.” 

Harry stared at him in shock, and knew that was true.

“If there are Gods, they must be amused,” Voldemort said tiredly. 

He rose to his feet to depart. Suddenly feeling alone, Harry followed suit. Voldemort looked at him askance. 

“I guess I want to see the Castle,” Harry invented up an excuse wildly. 

There was less mocking than Harry expected in Voldemort’s voice as he replied, “Then follow me, my liege lord. Let me give you the grand tour of your dominion.” 

Dominion. Harry knew that word. And over you, death shall have no dominion. Where had he seen that before? It did not matter, because he was dragging himself after Voldemort, out of the cell that had been his home for months. 

Torches lit up against their brackets as Voldemort led them through corridors wide and high. There were chandeliers on the ceiling encrusted by dust and cobwebs. 

“Could you make-?” Harry shook his head stupidly and bit off the rest of the question.

Voldemort looked at him carefully and then waved his wand twice, in huge sweeping arcs, and the cobwebs gave way to brightly lit sconces set in the gleaming bronze chandeliers. The alcoves had tapestries old and bearing words in another language. 

“Hungarian,” Voldemort explained. “Your late amour was Hungarian.” 

Harry did not bother getting furious about that. No, he was too busy enraptured by the high stained glass windows through which filtered in the winter sun. Rays streaked through the hall, lighting up dust motes, and then laid claim to the patch of stone where Voldemort stood, making him a statue clad in black, quiet and pensive as he watched Harry, and the clouds shifted up in the skies, and the light filtered through the colored panes now, and cast splashes of red and green and blue on Voldemort’s skin. 

For the first time, Harry found himself wondering how Voldemort had managed to architect such a delicate bone structure with a potion in a cauldron. Tom Riddle’s features had been handsome, but they had been manly, broad and strong. 

“I thought you wanted to see your castle.” 

Voldemort looked spooked by Harry’s gaze, so Harry took it away, back to the high ceilings and down to the smooth flagstones. 

“There are quarries in the Carpathians,” Voldemort said, in that didactic tone he took when explaining anything. 

He reminded Harry of Flitwick so when he did that. Voldemort continued speaking. Harry began walking after him, through the corridors, through halls large and small, through soldier’s quarters, through administrative offices, through storerooms and kitchens. 

“Grindelwald put hundreds of men to work in the quarries, and many hundreds to ferry the stone down the Danube, up the forests, until it reached the artisans he had captive here. They worked on it, for days and nights, until they built this castle for him. When he deemed it done, he did what many like him have done. He executed them all, so that the secrets of the stone would stay with the dead.” 

Here he looked back at Harry, and shook his head, and said matter-of-factly, “Now the secrets are yours.”

“I don’t even know the way back to my cell,” Harry muttered. 

“The castle is yours,” Voldemort said sharply. “Now, I daresay that you have no interest in the dungeons beneath or the rudimentary plumbing. I also suspect you have little fascination to see the large burning pits where they threw the corpses in.” 

Harry shuddered. He had forgotten that this grand edifice of stone and magic was no Hogwarts. Grindelwald had murdered innocents here, in the thousands. 

“There are marvels still to see,” Voldemort said briskly. 

Reluctantly, Harry followed him, up circular stairs, and he gasped in shock when they emerged out of a turret onto the ramparts that Harry had seen in the dreams under a full winter moon. Now there was snow falling thick, and the stones were covered in white, and beneath the forests too. The mountains stood a wall behind him, large and looming. 

Harry shielded his eyes from the bright sun. He had been inside for months. He realized he was crying, but he did not care. Voldemort had walked away to the ramparts. Harry remained where he was, cold and shivering, and inhaling huge gulps of the fresh air. He reached out his grimy fingers to catch snowflakes. They melted in his palms, and the water took the grime away. He lifted his face to the sun, and when he heard the wolves howling in the deep bowels of the forests, he wanted to howl his joy too. His teeth were chattering, but what did it matter?

He felt something warm being draped over his shoulders. 

“Your death by frostbite would tamper with my plans,” Voldemort announced. 

“Did he-?” Harry cleared his throat and turned to look properly at Voldemort. “Did Grindelwald see the sun?” 

Voldemort knew what he was asking. Had Grindelwald ever felt the sun on his face after Dumbledore had locked him away? 

“Love is capable of things great and terrible, Harry,” Voldemort replied, still looking over the snow-clad forests, twirling his wand absently between his fingers. “Love for Eurydice drew Orpheus into the lands of Hades. Albus Dumbledore’s love was capable of greatness too.” 

Harry did not reply to that, instead listening to the winds and the wolves. It sounded less frightening up here, than down in the cell. He brought the cape closer around his shoulders, and watched Voldemort lost in his own thoughts. What was he thinking of? Was he thinking about Grindelwald and Dumbledore? Was he thinking about the war he was losing? Was he thinking about the destroyed horcruxes? 

There they stood, under a winter sun, far from Privet Drive and Hogwarts. Were there Gods above, truly, watching all of this in amusement? He hoped there were. That way, he reasoned, at least someone would find amusement. 

“I have to be going,” Voldemort said. “Refrain from freezing to an inglorious end. The sun is not going anywhere else.” 

“Should I put the torches out?” Harry asked, though he did not know how to reach them.

“Do as you please,” Voldemort said dismissively. 

“Won’t that drain your magic?” 

“No more than perspiring.”

With that, Voldemort twirled his cloak about him, and vanished away in a dramatic fashion, though Harry was not terribly impressed. He had seen Dumbledore enact more fanciful entrances and exits, after all.

It was colder after Voldemort left. Harry walked back to the stairs, and then lifted his head up to look at the sun once more, and fervently smiled up at the white orb, hoping that it was shining bright upon Luna and Ron and Hermione and everyone else too. Then he went down the stairs, into the mausoleum that was his.

——-

He dithered at the threshold of the large bedroom. It had red damask curtains and a luxurious, enormous bed in the middle of the room. He wondered if this had been Grindelwald’s room. He stepped in. Nothing here could hurt him, right? 

He tied back the curtains, and saw a small portrait lying on the large window seat. He picked it up. Two men with sharp blue eyes. Father and son, he guessed instinctively. They were both wearing white robes bearing the mark of the Hallows. He dusted the portrait and took it to the mantel. It felt odd to keep it there, but he didn’t want to throw it out of the window. He would deal with it tomorrow. 

He walked back to the window and pried its hinges open. The cold night winds rushed in, and a few flecks of snow too. He sat by the window for a while, though it was freezing, and watched the moon rise over the trees. 

Then he closed the windows reluctantly and made his way to the bed. It was the most luxurious bed he had slept in. His old clothes looked awfully out of sorts on the rich silks. 

He felt odd lying down on such luxury, but it was comfortable and soft, and for some reason reminded him of being hugged by Molly Weasley. The blankets were warm, too warm.

His last thought before fading into sleep was that this seemed as good a place as any other to die.

——

“You came for me!” He said, reaching his grimy fingers through the bars. “Oh, fiam, you came for me!” 

Standing before him, tall and handsome, with sparkling blue eyes, was that young man he had seen in the portrait. On his beautiful face was an expression of rapt love. 

“Yes, I came, Apa.” There were tears shimmering in the young man’s eyes as he gripped his dirty hands through the bars. “My love will open these bars.” 

“Oh, no, you must not!” he warned his son, his lovely, beloved son. “Albus has strong enchantments. What if you are trapped here with me?”

“Then so be it!” the young man said bravely. “I want no other fate than to be with you.” 

Harry struggled, twisting beneath the blankets, trying to wake from the dreams, trying to be far from those memories. He was held still though, deep in the dream, and he watched the son’s love bend the bars, and he watched them embrace, in a manner more than familial. And then he was Grindelwald, and it was his hands eagerly stripping off his companion’s clothes. And it was him screaming in ecstasy as the young man knelt before him and looked up with an expression of rapture, and then sighed in desire, and took his cock deep into his lovely mouth. And it was him gripping with tight fists handfuls of dark, brown hair, and it was him shouting to the walls with pleasure and love. He staggered back, and watched possessively as the young man knelt there with white staining his perfect lips. And he laughed in joy, and he clutched his companion tight, and drew him to his bosom. 

And it was him screaming in horror and shock as the blue eyes of his son turned to red. 

“What are you, fiend?” Grindelwald shouted, still standing brave, still with his hands on his son’s cheeks. “What have you done to my son?” 

And then his voice broke, and he said, “Tell me you killed him cleanly.” 

“I slew a Dementor last summer, and found your son’s soul,” Voldemort replied. 

Grindelwald staggered back. “Albus promised!”

Voldemort watched him clinically, and then said, “I found his soul full of love, forbidden.” 

“Please!” Grindelwald shouted, bringing his hands to cover his ears. “Tell me no more. He is dead!”

“Can you resist me?” Voldemort asked, without artifice. “I am not him, I am not perfection, but I am here. A starving man needs a meal more than a feast. My magic woven around his soul, my magic constructing flesh that will please you and hold you, my magic conjuring whimpers of desire and whispers of love.”

“What will you get from that charade?” Grindelwald spat. “Will you go back and tell Albus how much I have fallen so that you can laugh together about my godforsaken love?” 

“I want the Castle,” Voldemort said briskly, and his form slid back smoothly into that of Grindelwald’s son. 

He was nude and beautiful, standing there before Grindelwald, and he smiled with love, and he turned to face the wall, bracing himself with palms against the cold stones, and whispered, “How I wish you would have me.” 

Grindelwald stood there, stricken by grief, and then his features settled into tired malice and fierce love, and he said, “I cannot resist you.” 

His hands were white against the young, warm flesh as he gripped hard enough to bruise and mark. 

“Do you remember what I told you the first time you came to me?” Grindelwald asked, through tears and gritted teeth. 

“Apa, you told me that the laws of the Gods cannot rule the passions of our hearts.”

Harry woke up in the large bed, alone but for the ghostly rays of the crescent moon streaking across the silk sheets. 

——-


	5. And then face to face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Snape goes on an adventure, in which Harry wonders how a cauldron can make magic, in which Voldemort shows how handy he can be around the house

He was left to himself in the days that followed. He walked to the castle terrace each morning, and watched the sun rise over the snowy peaks. He sat there until he could no longer feel his extremities, and then went into the bowels of the castle to claim his daily bowl of chicken soup. Then it was back again to watch the sun creep towards the treeline slowly. He knew that the next day was going to be the same, and yet he felt immense sorrow when dusk settled over the lands. And dusk set early in that brutal winter. 

Voldemort’s magic was strong and warm inside, but nature had a way of conquering mere men, and Harry found it gave him vicious pleasure to prove it to himself everyday. Then again, he thought uncomfortably, as he sat there and watched an avalanche on the mountains to his east, Voldemort was only a man. A cruel, manipulative man who had made himself closer to a monster with his risk mitigatory measures, certainly. Yet, that was not proving very successful, was it? Dumbledore was getting there, and he would get there. When Dumbledore faced Voldemort in battle next, there would be no more horcruxes, with the exception of Harry. Somehow, Harry knew this instinctively. Nature balanced everything out, in the end. And believing that was an easy surrender. It absolved him of his duty given by the scar and the wizarding world. Destiny was only a word. What mattered, as Dumbledore often said, was what men chose to do. And Harry, he realised, was content to not fight a war. 

How could he believe in the cult of a savior when he had grown up in a cupboard and taken out only to be pawed at and molested near every night? How could he believe in any cause, after all that he had seen? How could he, after knowing what Grindelwald had done, after knowing what Grindelwald had surrendered to? Grindelwald had been a tyrant, who had killed thousands. He was a man who had loved Dumbledore deeply to kneel and submit to him. He was a man whom Dumbledore had loved enough to be able to seal here for the rest of his life. And then there had been his son. Voldemort had been manipulative, as he had been with Hepzibah and with many others, but this instance struck Harry to the heart. Dully, he wondered how many people Voldemort had seduced or blackmailed into having sex as a trade for something he coveted. 

It was one of those days. He had nothing to do but think. Sometimes, thinking led to patience, to trusting in Dumbledore. Sometimes, thinking led to desperation, to wanting to find a way to escape or die fighting.

As he watched the first stars unveil themselves against the fading pink of dusk, he felt a thicker cape settle around his shoulders. He looked back to find Voldemort standing there, watching him. How long had he been watching Harry? What did it matter?

“I managed to find a house-elf who can cook more than chicken soup,” Voldemort announced.

He sounded pleased with himself, and seemed very much like he expected Harry to fall at his feet in gratitude. Harry blinked. Clearly, Voldemort did not know that his fare was much better than what Harry got at the Dursleys. 

It was their first meeting after Harry had woken up with the Castle’s memories of Grindelwald and his son. Harry cleared his throat in mortification. Voldemort was not paying attention to him, instead watching the avalanches on the mountains. 

“The days are going to be colder, Harry,” he was saying. “Perhaps it is best to stay inside.”

“The one element you haven’t managed to conquer,” Harry said, rising to his feet, and wondering when he had grown taller. Voldemort kept him well-fed, like a lamb being prepared for sacrifice. 

“Winter is the last enemy,” Voldemort allowed. “I remember possessing small creatures and despairing that I would not see the sun again, for they would huddle up in the boles of trees or deep caverns underneath. I remember starvation, for there was nothing to forage. I remember terror and death, for there were always predators.” 

Albania. Harry stared at Voldemort in curiosity, not knowing if it was a wise idea to ask for more. His fascination took over, and he asked anyway, “Did you get the memories of the creatures you possessed? Was it confusing? Did you forget them later?”

Voldemort narrowed his gaze. Then he nodded in understanding and said, “The Castle is old, and has been witness to many significant events. The creatures I possessed were small mammals or snakes. They had short life-spans and memories. The primal needs - to satiate hunger and thirst, to mate, to hunt and to flee; those were the only concerns.”

He paused, as if pondering to say more. Then he shrugged and said, “Long-term, it was the only viable option. Possessing humans for a protracted period of time, with all of their emotional intricacies and mental processes, would have worn me down.” 

“Will I go mad? The Castle is full of memories.”

“I doubt that.” Voldemort nodded to the stairs and began walking. Harry followed him, and gave one last wistful glance at the skies. 

“Why?”

“You are, without exception, the least likely candidate to be overwhelmed by possessing a castle,” Voldemort announced, lifting his robes with his right hand a few inches so that he could descend the stairs easily. “Only think, Harry. Ever since that night, we have always been possessed and possessing, and the lines between our minds are blurred.”

Harry thought about that. It was true that the scar hurting had turned him angry, but he had learned to live with that.

“If you bury me, can you write on my tomb that I learned to live with it?”

Voldemort did not bother replying. 

He considered that the only achievement of his life. He learned to live with stuff. Sirius dying, Vernon, Voldemort. Draco Malfoy, or even Ron, would never be able to do that. They would be constantly whining, constantly unhappy and blaming someone else. That was normal, though. He was the freak. Maybe, he was permanently damaged by Voldemort, and that had given him a high tolerance of tragedy and bad-luck even as a child. 

“Off to sleep with you,” Voldemort decreed. “I have some work here.”

So Voldemort was going to stay the night. Harry shrugged and made his way to his bedroom.

“And Harry, clear your mind.”

—— 

He tried. He really tried. 

And yet, there he was, in the body of a snake, as she twisted and coiled restlessly. She was hotter than usual, and Harry felt clammy inside her. And then, as arousal spiked deep through him, as he felt blood rush to his cock, he realized why she was rubbing her scales against the stones in that restless manner. 

She was in heat. She wanted to mate. 

He tried to think about the stones of the castle, about his bedroom, about a bowl of chicken soup, hoping that the memories would pull him back. 

The door slid open then, and a familiar figure in bIack entered. Snape. Harry tried to shout a warning in vain. 

Snape came close, and said soothingly to the creature, “I have what you need.” 

He brought his wand to her tail and she hissed in distrust, coiling away. Harry smelled it though, because she smelled it. Herbs and magic. And more confusingly, Snape had on him the scent of a male snake. 

She was confused. Harry was confused too. What was Snape playing at? Then Snape edged closer to her tail, and Harry felt Snape’s breathing on his skin, and he shivered despite himself as he thought of Vernon. Snape stroked the tail gently, and the heat through the snake’s body surged, and Harry groaned with her. Snape then cast a spell deep inside her, and poison bloomed sharp through her blood, and Harry choked. She swung her tail about wildly, sluggish unlike her usual movements, and she was still addled by the surge of male pheromones. She hissed and spun, and Snape watched with hooded eyes as she suffered, as Harry suffered.

“For Lily,” Snape murmured, and there was a sheen to his gaze then. Harry could not think of that then, because he was poisoned, because his stomach was burning from inside out, because he was still aroused. 

In the throes of the snake’s dying rose a presence that was familiar to Harry. He struggled, from the poison, from the snake’s torment, and from the malicious, vindictive presence that ripped through him then. The snake reared, hissing, with slitted eyes, one last time, and Snape raised his wand to defend himself. She spun out and away from his curses, and her massive girth swept across the room uncontrolled, and hit Snape across his torso. He crumpled to his feet, and still unleashed his Sectumsempra on the snake. She was bleeding, cut apart and her tail wriggled detached where it lay on the stones, and she reared back. Snape breathed a sigh of relief and was starting to cast again, when the snake hissed her final lament, and through her broke magic deep and old, and Snape’s eyes were resigned. 

“For Lily,” he whispered, as he fell.

And Harry screamed.

———

He woke in his bed in the Castle. He panicked and struggled against bonds as he felt the intrusion in his throat. 

“Calm down,” Voldemort said. “I had to intubate you to pump your stomach.”

Harry tried to focus on him. With a sigh, Voldemort dropped something on Harry’s nose. The glasses brought Voldemort to sight. 

Harry tried to swallow, but something caught in his chest, and he was about to retch, but he could not manage to do that. 

“You must keep still,” Voldemort ordered. “I am still in the process of siphoning the poison away.” 

Frightened, Harry tugged at the bonds, imploring Voldemort to remove at least those. He could keep still. 

“No movements,” Voldemort rejoined, and then he undid the bonds and Harry breathed in relief. 

“It can put you in a coma if I risk magical methods of tranquilization,” Voldemort explained. “You must keep still, and you must breathe through the pain. Do you understand?” He seated himself on the bed, and then took Harry’s prone right palm to place it over his thigh. “Squeeze once for yes, and twice for no.” 

Wouldn’t it be easier to blink? And then Harry understood why. Voldemort was going to take the poison out through the tube. He shuddered. He had gone through worse, hadn’t he? He could do this. This could keep him focused, and he need not think about Snape’s fate. 

For Lily, Snape had said. Tears rose to Harry’s eyes, but he tried to stay still nevertheless. 

It was difficult, having Voldemort leaning over him, and fiddling with the tube until it settled down to Voldemort’s satisfaction. Harry jerked despite his instructions when Voldemort placed his head on Harry’s stomach. 

“Hold still,” Voldemort said irritably, and then moved up Harry’s old T-shirt. Then he placed his head again on the bare skin. He nodded to himself, and his look of intense focus worried Harry.

“It is not in your lungs,” Voldemort told him. “That is a good start.” 

It only got weirder after that. Pain dug deep into Harry’s gut as Voldemort set up a suction pipe at the top, to draw the gastric juices out. It was a long process, as Voldemort drew away the poison, regularly throwing away the small cup at the top.

Harry watched him suck deep, and thought, oddly enough, about how he had taken on the facade of Grindelwald’s son and sucked him off. The front of Voldemort’s robes was wet with his sweat and Harry’s gastric juices. He took large gulps of water regularly, from the pitcher at Harry’s bedside table, and some of it slopped down his front too. 

It was tiring, delicate work. Voldemort clearly valued the horcrux. 

After what seemed to be hours, after Harry had borne pain and thirst and the urge to scratch his nose for what seemed to be unendurably long, Voldemort heaved a sigh and began gently moving away the suction apparatus.

“The tube has to be moved carefully, lest there is hemorrhage,” Voldemort said, prying open Harry’s mouth wide, and squinting into his throat. He took a deep breath and rubbed his hands warm, and then went about mercifully quickly and gently about his task. 

When Harry closed his mouth and swallowed, fire stormed down his throat. 

“It will hurt,” Voldemort informed him, as he put the tube away. He slowly helped Harry up to a seated position against the headboard. Then he brought a large phial of milk. 

Harry looked up at him. 

“Milk of magnesia, and some soothing herbs,” Voldemort told him. 

Each swallow hurt as badly as the time he had broken his bones on the Quidditch Pitch after that match with the tampered Snitch. 

There must have been something to sedate too.

—- 

When he woke again, the pain had mellowed to a manageable level, and he sighed. Even a sigh cost his throat. It was bright morning. Voldemort was seated at the bay window, and watching the forest. 

Harry pulled the blankets closer to his neck, as he remembered Voldemort pushing up his clothes and placing his head on Harry’s bare stomach. Then his body drew his mind back, and he tried to get up. Pain shot through his stomach, and he fell back unsteadily, winded. 

“Stay in bed,” Voldemort said, getting up from the window as he saw Harry’s state. He came over and looked down at Harry. 

Then he nodded and said, “If you can avoid sudden movements, I will help you.” 

Harry blinked assent. 

Voldemort’s hands brushed Harry’s cock as he brought down the jeans Harry wore. It was the first time that someone else than Vernon was touching Harry’s cock. He blushed and squirmed uncomfortably. He felt violated. He felt as he had felt when Vernon had pinched and prodded his cock, telling him that it was the smallest cock he had seen, telling him that he must be a bitch. Voldemort rose to his feet again and placed a bracing arm about Harry’s waist for stilling sudden movements. Harry looked up bravely, waiting to hear what words Voldemort had to mock, and saw that Voldemort was looking irritated. 

“If you could get on with your activities,” Voldemort muttered. 

That brought back comfort to Harry. He held his cock and urinated into the chamberpot. He had missed the first few times in the cell, and Grindelwald had watched and laughed. He had improved his marksmanship considerably since those days. 

Voldemort put him back to rights, and then meticulously tucked him back into the bed. 

“Try speaking,” Voldemort ordered, standing there with his arms crossed. 

“Hello,” Harry said, and felt as if his throat was being ripped through by razor blades.

“It will improve. Keep speaking.” 

Harry blinked at that. He was hardly the best conversationalist, usually preferring to listen to his friends. And he had nothing to talk to Voldemort about, anyway. 

Voldemort scowled, and left the room, and then came back immediately with an old book. 

Harry looked at the book dumped on his lap. “Nursery rhymes?” he croaked. 

“Read aloud, slowly. Stop if you are bleeding.”

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,  
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;  
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,  
She shall have music wherever she goes.

That was a very kinky rhyme, now that Harry was reading it as an adult. He glanced across at Voldemort, who had taken up his seat at the window. Voldemort’s head was relaxed against the wall. His posture screamed lassitude and tiredness. 

For the first time, Harry thought past the fact that he was a horcrux and thus entitled to risk mitigatory measures. He thought of Pomfrey and Molly and everyone else who had taken care of him when he had been injured. They had been kind and warm to him. They loved him. 

Voldemort had been gentle. 

“Keep reading.” 

“Have you done that tube insertion before, often?”

“You are the lucky first,” Voldemort muttered. 

His line of work tended towards killing than saving.

And Harry read out the next nursery rhyme painfully. It was interesting. He darted another look at Voldemort before taking a deep breath and plunging. 

"Tom, Tom, he was a piper's son,  
He learned to play when he was young.  
And all the tune that he could play  
Was over the hills and far away;  
Tom with his pipe did play with such skill  
That those who heard him could never keep still;  
As soon as he played they began to dance,  
Even the pigs on their hind legs would after him dance."

When Harry finished, there was only silence. Yet, he fancied he could hear a quiet, still sound, from an earlier time, of an orphan abandoned in London, pooled in his dead mother’s blood. Voldemort had hated that name. Harry did not dare look up. He felt the magic restless in the room. 

He would have gone back to the chorus again, but he refrained, remembering Voldemort helping him with the chamberpot without mocking. He looked up, finally, and saw Voldemort’s palms were fisted tight. There was confusion on Voldemort’s face, well-lit against the sunlight, and it stayed there despite his attempt to conceal.

“Nursery rhymes are odd,” Harry said finally, wanting to end the tenseness. “This one has a young man playing a pipe with skill. The last one had riding a horse.” 

Voldemort seized that chance and said quickly, “One wonders if they were written by teenagers with nothing else to do. Cock-horses and playing the pipes, indeed.”

There. Harry had made the first sexual joke of his life, and it had been to reduce Voldemort’s discomfort on hearing that name. He felt that he had played fair, that he had repaid Voldemort for not humiliating him earlier. 

Voldemort turned on the seat to face Harry properly. Taking that as a cue for conversation, Harry asked curiously, “You knew about the snake?”

“You had fallen into the others right before they were destroyed,” Voldemort said. “I knew that Severus would come on Dumbledore’s say-so. When the wards alerted me to his arrival, I came to you. Knowing him, poison was the most likely weapon.”

“You didn't try to prevent what he did,” Harry said.

There had been retribution. Snape had been killed, and Harry still remembered his mother’s name whispered with the dying man’s last breath. If Voldemort had known, why had he left the snake to its fate? She had been unstable. Had Voldemort considered that risky? Didn’t he care about the other containers of his soul now that he had Harry in a castle impregnable? 

“You must strive to clear your mind,” Voldemort said solemnly, and then ruined the severity with a yawn. 

Feeling guilty, Harry said, “You don't need to stay to keep an eye on me.”

Voldemort nodded and rose to his feet. Harry wondered what crypt he would return to. Not that he had any right to be snobbish, given that Grindelwald’s castle was the largest crypt in Europe. 

He called out in alarm as he saw Voldemort suddenly sway on his feet, light-headed. Voldemort cursed and summoned the pitcher of water. He did not catch it in time, and it clattered down at his feet, pouring its contents down his robes. Harry remembered how he had messily slopped the water down his front, in his preoccupation with the tube in Harry’s throat. He seemed slowed down by weariness and poor nutrition. 

“This is a large bed,” Harry said uncomfortably. “You can take the other side.”

“Wake me if you experience hemorrhage,” Voldemort ordered, before flopping onto the bed, as far from Harry as he could, and then immediately falling asleep on the top of the sheets. Harry watched him for a while, wondering if he had eaten at all. It must have been inanition, as Pomfrey often told him when she met him after a summer at the Dursleys. 

So Harry was really in Voldemort’s power, he decided. Why else would Voldemort fall asleep so comfortably in a castle that he had no possession of, close to a boy he had been prophesied to be killed by? 

He did not find sleep again. It had taken him time to become accustomed to sharing a room with Ron in the Burrow, and later at Grimmauld. It had been easier at Hogwarts, where he had found safety in numbers. The large dormitory had been safe. 

Why had he then no trouble falling asleep around Grindelwald, in that cell? Maybe he truly had projected Dumbledore and that sense of safety he had in Dumbledore’s company onto Grindelwald? 

With Voldemort sprawled over the bed, with his long, loose limbs akimbo, Harry found himself curled up at the edge. Each time Voldemort shifted in his sleep, Harry startled despite himself. Odd that he feared Voldemort more in bed than when awake and armed. 

Speaking of arms, he had not seen Voldemort use his wand in a long time, not since he had murdered Grindelwald. Why?

He found himself thinking that he was becoming as creepy as Grindelwald, watching someone sleep with such prurient fascination. Voldemort was a restless sleeper, twisting and moving about a great deal. Was he used to a larger bed? Had he shared his bed before? Harry doubted that. Very little about Voldemort suggested sociability, far less an inclination towards intimacy. 

Voldemort’s robes clung to his skin at first, since they were soaked by the pitcher that had fallen. Later, they dried out, under Harry’s gaze, and they were thrown askew as Voldemort twisted in his sleep. There were small scars on his left wrist, no doubt from making cuts for rituals. There was a starburst patterned scar on the inner part of his left thigh. Harry wondered what it was from. There were moles on his clavicles, faint brown and red. Harry found them fascinating. He had thought of Voldemort’s body as plastic, as a construct of magic. The moles made him look human in Harry’s eyes, for the first time. 

Voldemort twisted again, and pressed his face into the sheets. The robes shifted across higher, and Harry saw the entire length of the left leg exposed, from the sharp decline of the pelvic bone down the scarred thigh, to the softly rounded knee, and down to the delicately shaped ankles and the long, knobby toes. 

The Castle must be breaking him, for he felt like Grindelwald, prurient and fascinated, and wanted to lift the robes still higher, to see what Voldemort’s cock and balls looked like, to see what Voldemort’s navel looked like, to see what what Voldemort’s armpits looked like, to see what Voldemort’s nipples looked like. He swallowed and tried to read his book of nursery rhymes instead, but Humpty Dumpty was incapable of stirring his interest from Voldemort. He pressed his knuckles into his tired eyes and tried to clear his mind. 

It wasn’t the worst line of thought, he consoled himself. He had been frightened by men in close proximity, especially if it involved scantily clad men. There had been Oliver Wood, whom he had worshipped as his childhood hero, until the day Wood had walked out of the shower and cheerily patted him on the back before carrying on in blissful ignorance of the panic that he had caused in Harry. 

And he was here, in the end, and he was no longer scared by a male body so close. He was not scared, and he was genuinely curious to see more. How had his blood, and Wormtail’s hand, and Voldemort’s father’s bones led to this? 

He got his earlier wish, when Voldemort shuffled onto his back again, dragging away the robes by an inch more, revealing the head of a soft, floppy cock that lay nestled between his thighs. It was dark rose, the color of dusk over the Carpathians. Harry bit down his lips to suppress his laughter at that silly comparison which sprung to his head. He was well on his way to reach Grindelwald’s sanity level. A smothered giggle, disguised as a cough, escaped him nevertheless. 

Voldemort woke then, and looked at him blearily. He stretched his hands over his head and arched his spine, and that drew the robes up.

Harry realized that he had been staring rapt because Voldemort’s hands hastily came to drag his robes back to decency, covering the soft length of his cock and scrotum with its sparse smattering of hair.

“You have a castle under your thumb, and you see nothing better to do than laughing at my genitals,” Voldemort said darkly, rising up. 

“I wasn’t!” Harry said quickly, startled by that. He thought of Vernon mocking him. “I was only laughing at myself, because I think I am getting as batty as Grindelwald watching someone else sleep.”

“Watching me sleep?” Voldemort sounded disbelieving. “You must realize that attempts to kill me would not succeed. ”

“Can I see your body?” Harry blurted out then, before he could think twice and talk himself out of that craven curiosity.

Voldemort blinked, nonplussed, and his hand came automatically to Harry’s forehead to check for fever. 

“I am not hallucinating,” Harry said quietly, sitting up straight, pushing away Voldemort’s hand. 

Day had faded, and Voldemort’s face was unreadable in the flickering light of the torches in the bedroom that came alive after sunset. 

“You have sufficient leverage over me,” Voldemort said quietly. “You have the castle. I cannot harm you. Grindelwald’s fate will not be yours.” 

“I know,” Harry said, though he did not know. 

He did not care about that right then. Tomorrow had always been out of his ability to control. There was only the moment he lived, as he sat there on the bed watching Voldemort’s pensive face. Harry tried to look calm and curious, hoping that would be honest enough. He did not understand why his palms were clammy, or why his throat hurt, or why his gut tightened in expectation. 

Voldemort looked to the ceiling, as if imploring a deity divine for patience. Then he asked, “Is this some delayed adolescent inclination to compare and measure the length of your cock against mine?” 

“What? No!” Harry exclaimed, repulsed by that, thinking of Vernon’s comments. “I mean… I only wanted to see all of you.”

The moles, and that scar on his thigh, and all of it. 

It sounded bonkers. He was going as batty as Grindelwald. 

“Just…I didn't mean anything offensive,” he said miserably, thinking about how all of it must have sounded to Voldemort. 

He was not trying to be a pervert. He had no sexual interest in Voldemort. Voldemort was not Luna. He was not a woman. He was not even likable. It was only that Voldemort’s body, made of magic and will, fascinated Harry so. How had he made that in a cauldron? 

“I was only curious.”

Voldemort exhaled deeply and then said, “I shall indulge you, just this once.” 

He opened his robes without hesitance or shyness, and peeled them away from his shoulders, and then off his arms. He stared at Harry, daring him to say anything.

“Oh,” Harry said, his breath leaving him in a whoosh. Voldemort was differently striking when awake than he had been when asleep. The intentional relaxation of his posture added to the charm. There were more little moles, splashed across his chest, and even at his flanks. Why, there was a small red one, perched right where collarbone met left shoulder. He clumsily reached out, and he felt Voldemort tense, but he carried on anyway, and touched the little mole. Voldemort’s shoulders drew taut, as if about to shirk away, but Harry preceded that with a quick squeeze and caress. 

“What machinations are transpiring in your head?” Voldemort demanded. “I am not your buxom-chested friend with the golden curls.” 

No, he was not Luna. 

“You are latching on the one living creature you have interactions with,” Voldemort analysed. “You should find some other method of managing your sexual needs.”

Harry had no idea what to say to that. He did not want to have sex with Voldemort. He just wanted to touch him, to touch his moles and bones, to watch him while he slept. 

“This isn’t about sex,” he tried to explain.

“Everything is about sex and power,” Voldemort said tiredly. 

Harry did not know what was in his head, so he let his hands take away, and traced the long length of Voldemort’s clavicles down to his chest, and trailed his fingers to the gentle slope of stomach. 

“Lie back?” 

Voldemort acceded, and was watching him carefully, no doubt seeing in Harry ulterior motivations and schemes that were beyond Harry’s addled mind. 

“I only want to touch and look,” Harry confessed, and pressed his fingers into the sharp cheekbones, feeling the contours of Voldemort’s face. 

He touched every inch of skin on Voldemort’s front, sparing not an inch. He gently lifted each hair on Voldemort’s scrotum and let it curl back into lassitude. As he lingered on Voldemort’s calves, he noticed arousal sink into Voldemort’s body deep. 

“Oh.”

“You have only yourself to blame,” Voldemort muttered, throwing an arm over his eyes. “Are you quite done?” 

Harry squeezed each knobby toe and then pressed his palm flat against each heel. 

“Grindelwald has broken your head,” Voldemort said. 

“Could you turn?” 

“You would be wasting your time if you try to garrote me,” Voldemort informed him. 

Harry did not pay mind to that. Really, he was content to leave killing and war to the others. He was somewhere he could never leave. What did the world outside matter? 

Voldemort’s back was a work of art, all sharp planes and shifting sinews under warm flesh. There were moles too, dancing across Voldemort’s skin with each breath. 

When Harry bent to press a soft kiss to the one right at the base of Voldemort’s neck, he wondered why Voldemort groaned and muttered choice words.

“I like your body,” Harry said, wanting to say something about how he found the clean lines of Voldemort’s torso. “I don't have ulterior motives. This isn’t about sex and power. I find it beautiful, how you made this out of Wormtail and your father and a cauldron.”

For a while, Voldemort did not say anything. Then he sighed, as if exasperated, and said, “Aesthetics were far from my mind when I concocted that. I wouldn’t have chosen Wormtail or those bones otherwise.” 

“And me?” 

“I had chosen you years ago, hadn’t I?” and there was resignation colored by bitterness in that statement. “I had chosen you years ago, and you had no say in the matter.” 

And he continued to not have any. Harry pondered the gentle curve of Voldemort’s thighs joining hip, and trailed his fingers along the gradient. 

“Harry, I must ask you to cease inflicting your aesthetic appreciation on me, unless your appreciation stretches to watching a man wank on your sheets.” 

There was a break in Voldemort’s voice. Harry wondered if this was what Grindelwald and his son had, if this was what Ron and Hermione had. They had all looked so happy to be naked and touching each other. Touch had elicited pleasure. 

There was pleasure in sex, he knew. Why else would humans mate and have children? What the mind knew, the heart didn’t. He only thought of Vernon when he thought about sex, and apart from prim fantasies of Luna and Ginny and Cho, he had not developed sexually. 

Initially he had thought that he was slow. Later, he had thought that he might just be sexually stunted, broken by his experiences. Hermione said there were proper scientific words for that, and she would have shuddered if she had heard Harry calling himself stunted or broken. 

He did not know. All he knew was that Voldemort’s sharp, staccato breathing brought curiosity and a sense of pride. 

“Wank on my sheets,” he said in an unsteady voice. Voldemort stilled under his hands, shocked. He had only meant to jolt Harry, hadn’t he? No, he wanted to see. He wanted to watch. 

“Please. Show me.”

“Harry-”

“I want to,” Harry said hurriedly, before he lost his nerve. “Turn around. I want to see.”

Voldemort’s eyes were closed as if in pain. There was color to his cheeks, and spreading down his chest, as if he was mortified by the situation they had managed to end in. 

“You are not-” he tried to say. Then he shook his head and attempted again, “Inadvisable.” 

Harry decided to trust hands over words, and placed them gingerly over Voldemort’s stomach. It seemed clinical, so he tentatively shuffled over and straddled Voldemort’s knees.

“Through a glass darkly, and then face to face,” Voldemort murmured, and there was wistfulness in his gaze then as he looked at Harry, and Harry wondered if he was seeing someone else. 

“You must have been sought after,” Harry mumbled. “So many people would have wanted to see you like this.”

“I think you are decidedly singular in your appreciation,” Voldemort said, torn between amusement and scandal. “May I?” 

“Yes, please, I want to watch you.” Harry even dared to trail his index finger along Voldemort’s thigh upwards. 

Voldemort’s hands were methodical and precise. He had done this many times before. Each twist and tug was measured and smooth. Harry wondered if he was the only freak. Ron and the others made so many jokes about sex and masturbation. He felt something curl in his gut, waking slowly, but it was still more an emotion than a physical reaction. Voldemort’s mouth fell open slack, and for a moment, as his body drew taut as a bow poised, he looked carven of odalisque. He fell back, panting, and there was stickiness on Harry’s hands. There had been stickiness inside his mouth and arse after Vernon’s activities, and that had felt tainted. This, this was not so. This woke in him happiness and possessiveness, and he took pride in Voldemort’s responses. 

“Anything else you are fascinated by?” Voldemort asked, trying to sound annoyed, and failing. There was the flush of exertion on his skin, and he looked frozen in time. 

“All of you,” Harry admitted, and the confession came easier than it should have. 

Voldemort rolled his eyes and said, “I understand this is not about sex and power. Nevertheless, it is traditional to stay a while and linger.” 

Vernon was not a lingerer.

Harry looked at Voldemort. He saw a man wrecked by passion, and a man exalted by passion. 

“Can I keep touching you?” 

Voldemort nodded and yawned. He did not protest even when Harry placed his head on his chest and breathed his post-orgasmic scent in. It was different from how he had smelled earlier. He touched the sweat-slick skin and smiled when the body underneath shifted in response. 

“Lift up,” Voldemort ordered. 

When Harry did so, Voldemort pressed his hands over Harry’s cheeks in a brisk, business-like manner, and bent his head to press a firm kiss to Harry’s lips. Harry exhaled in surprise, and Voldemort seized the chance to coax his mouth more open, and then lazily flicked his tongue about Harry’s. It was not as weird as Harry remembered from Cho’s experiments, and when Voldemort pulled back and dozed off, Harry decided that Voldemort’s brand of detachment might come in handy in this domain. He sat up again and drank in the sight of Voldemort’s body once more. 

—-


	6. Atropos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry discovers Luna's breasts, in which Dumbledore plays his last card, in which Voldemort picks a new lake to picnic at.

Harry was left alone, in his Castle, and he waited there as winter thawed its grip over the land. Bleakness melted away to black earth uncovered, and soon spring shoots would follow. Bleakness remained yet, though, in Harry. 

What was his life to be? Was his fate to be Grindelwald’s, for wasn’t he shut away where Grindelwald had killed many, where he had taken his son as a lover, where he had submitted to Albus Dumbledore, where he had been imprisoned for years and driven to insanity, where he had fallen to Voldemort’s callous cruelty in taking on the soul of his son, where he had tried to kill Harry, where he had been killed with little ado? 

Thinking of Grindelwald left Harry only with questions. Why had Grindelwald taken his son as a lover? He had loved dearly Albus Dumbledore. Why had he then become bewitched by his son? The implications left Harry reeling and disgusted. Grindelwald had been a tyrant, a leader of men, believing in a terrifying ideology of racial purity. How had he been as a father? Had his son even had the chance to resist, to say no, to get away? Had it been like Uncle Vernon? 

Yet, Grindelwald in his cell had not touched Harry, even if he had been clearly fascinated, though it gave Harry only disgust and anger and sadness at that thought. He had been accepting of that from Grindelwald. He had willingly asked for Grindelwald’s company even if he had known that the old man may touch him in ways he didn’t want. Why had he asked for that? Had it been simply loneliness? 

He was lonely now. Yet, he did not wish for Voldemort’s company. He had not seen Voldemort after the man had left at the break of dawn, after that strange night. He had tried slip away quietly, but Harry, who was ever the light sleeper, had woken to the rustling of the sheets, and watched him in the light of dawn. 

“Such an eldritch creature you are,” he had whispered to Harry, keeping his eyes averted in discomfort at Harry’s staring. “A creature born of Midsummer and Halloween, of a mother’s love and a murderer’s soul, of Gryffindor’s blood and Grindelwald’s stones.” 

Harry had not replied to that whimsical declaration. His mind had been occupied by tracing the long line of Voldemort’s back, and the soft bumps of his spine. 

Later, he had wondered if Voldemort’s phial of medicine had contained something that affected inhibitions. Why else, he wondered, would he have asked for Voldemort to strip in his bed, to come on his sheets? Why else, he wondered, would he have touched mole and bone, and kissed skin at whim? 

He smelled fragrant flowers on the breeze, as he stood on the ramparts. There were trees strong all around. He could identify many of them, because he had been a little boy in Muggle school, who had only picture books to look at during the break sessions. Dudley did not like to chase him down in the library. It had been a refuge. 

Birch and larch, fir and pine, and alder too. Spruce and sycamore, and hundreds of beeches in every direction. This was a starkly beautiful land; green and wild in the lower reaches of the mountains surrounding the Castle, and white still on the tall ranges. 

As he stood there, herds of chamois made their way close to the Castle, and crossed past his viewpoint to the little brook that bubbled by. They frolicked around in the water, and a few kept wary watch for dangers. There were wolves and wildcats always lurking, and Harry had seen more than once an innocent young chamois fall prey to the predators. He had called out warnings to them the first few times, and sometimes they had fled as his voice carried on the wind. These days, though, he was inured to the sight of the chase and the kill, and reasoned that nature knew what she was doing. Who was he to meddle with nature?

After the snake’s death, he had not fallen into another creature. He had not fallen into another object. He had been present and aware, in his own mind, and there had been no escape. The dreams had been substituted by sleepless nights of restlessness, loneliness, and worry. 

He had lasted many years in a cupboard, and in Vernon’s clutches. Had he come to the end of his resilience? He was tired, and he just wanted a release. At least the chamois were foolish enough to not see their death lurking around the corner, and they lived well until then. The wolves and the wildcats did not trap them alive and take them to a prison. They killed when they needed to eat. There was no malice to that. 

Men, though, men were different. They had ideals and ideologies. The greater good, the better race, liberty, equality, religion, and any of the tens of causes that people believed in and fought for - all of that had nothing to do with nature’s ways of ensuring survival and balance through the method of predator and prey. 

Voldemort had fled, Harry concluded. He had fled because he had no idea what to make of Harry’s sudden interest in his body. He had fled because, in the light of the day, his passion in the aftermath of Harry’s touching and looking had become too much to bear, had caused him mortification and anger. He was used to controlling his sexual dealings, by casting them in a game of power, by making sure he was using his body to get something else he wanted. So he had been confused and angry by what had happened with Harry, because he had not gained anything from it, and that was at odds with how he preferred to use sex as a tool.

It was not a bad thing. It gave Harry time to come to terms with everything. Why had he hesitated to make the move on Cho? Why hadn’t he leapt into a physical relationship with Ginny, even though she had wanted it? He liked Luna, but he could not really imagine fucking her. Was it sex that repulsed him? Was it because of Vernon? He had seen Grindelwald fucking his son. He had walked in on Ron and Hermione many times. Why hadn’t all of that repulsed him? He had not been turned on, but he had felt the warmth and happiness that the couple had exuded. 

Then there was Voldemort. It had given Harry pride and a streak of possessiveness to see Voldemort so undone by Harry’s touches and gaze. It had made Harry feel powerful, feel necessary, feel right. It had not aroused him. The kiss Voldemort had initiated aroused him afterwards whenever he thought of it. It was the first time he had felt aroused by another person, and he wondered why it was over a kiss. He thought of masturbating, to make use of that arousal, but he could never bring himself to it. 

He did not feel cheated or broken, though, he realized. He liked what he had done. He did not feel squeamish or traumatized by anything that had happened that night. Did it matter if he could not masturbate or enjoy it physically? He had really enjoyed it emotionally and mentally. Maybe he was like that, and Vernon had nothing to do with it. He liked watching, he liked touching, and he liked bringing pleasure in some ways to another person. This absence of libido could have been a major obstacle if he had married, or if he had entered a serious relationship. There would have been accusations of him not being manly enough, and they would have asked him to go to St. Mungo’s for virility potions or aphrodisiacs. He did not have to worry about that, in this castle where Voldemort had entombed him alive. 

 

He went to bed with his mind at peace. 

So it was just par on the course for his life that he woke up in a locket between Luna’s bra-cups. 

Her breasts were heavy and full. Nestled between them, he felt suffocated and safe. The locket was hard and cold, and it cut into her flesh, and he wondered why she did not complain. 

With her was Ron and Hermione, watching her dubiously. 

“It is Harry,” she was saying. “And I must keep him safe from Professor Dumbledore.” 

That did not sound too convincing. And clearly, Hermione and Ron did not look convinced.

“It is an old locket Kreacher used to polish a lot,” Ron said kindly. “It belonged to Regulus Black, Luna. Harry didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Harry missed Ron so much right then. Perhaps that came though the locket, intensely, because Luna gasped and touched her hands to her chest as if in sudden pain. 

“You should get some rest,” Hermione said then, looking sad and tired. “We need to be ready for tomorrow.” 

For tomorrow? What was going to happen? Were they in a war? 

Oh, shut away from everywhere, from everyone, he had surrendered to fate and his own inability to change anything that mattered! It was hard to be resigned to that, to accept his helplessness, when he saw how weary Hermione looked. She should not have to deal with any of that: she was only a child, and not even a child cursed by prophecy at that. 

“He is so worried about us,” Luna said earnestly, and Harry could not blame Ron for looking at her as if she had gone bonkers. 

Right then, Minerva McGonagall and Dumbledore stepped into the room, followed by many others of the Order. Dumbledore took one look at the locket and realization flickered over his craggy features. 

Luna stiffened in fear and closed her palms over her heart, concealing the locket in vain. 

“Anything of concern, Miss Lovegood?” Minerva McGonagall asked her, noting her flushed, pale features with worry. 

And Dumbledore watched silently as Luna shook her head and offered pathetic excuses, citing stress and sleeplessness getting the better of her. Minerva clucked in sympathy, Hermione exhaled in relief, and Ron looked suspicious. 

“Please give me the locket,” Dumbledore said then, his eyes hard and worried. “This house has many cursed possessions, and the locket bears the taint of dark magic. I don’t want you to be harmed.”

“I can’t be harmed,” Luna whispered then, her voice weak but determined. “It is only Harry. He won’t harm me.” 

Minerva looked startled by that declaration. Hermione shook her head imploringly at Luna. Ron, too, was looking frightened. Remus and Tonks, and the Weasleys many, and Moody, and others, looked confused, eyes flicking back and forth between the girl and the Headmaster.

“There is magic you don't understand, Luna,” Dumbledore said, kindness still reining in his determination to destroy Voldemort. “The locket is made of such magic.” 

“It has Harry though,” she said quietly. 

Somehow, Harry sensed truth ringing clear in her voice, carrying through in its conviction despite the sheer disbelief of such an idea, and Remus was the first to say, “You are right, Luna.” 

She sagged in relief. 

Then Dumbledore said quietly, tiredly, wretchedly, “They are both there, Luna.”

There were gasps and exclamations of horror all around. Luna was the only one unsurprised. Had she known? Had she known after the tiara? Why was she still set on protecting Harry? Did she believe that there was a chance to spare him and destroy the soul that resided in the locket? 

“You must throw him out, then,” Luna said, her voice quaking in fear. “Then you can destroy the rest.”

Dumbledore did not reply. 

“You cannot-” she whispered, stricken. 

“There is magic you don’t understand,” Dumbledore said gently. “We must destroy the locket. Harry has survived so far. He is not tied to the locket. He will be safe.”

Each time, the horcrux inside had shielded Harry, or Voldemort had directly saved him. Why was Dumbledore so confident? 

“I won’t,” Luna said then, fiercely. “I won’t, until you bring Harry here.” 

“He is the safest where he is,” Dumbledore said, implacable. “I will not endanger his life.” 

Then there was the shrill clang of the doorbell. Remus rushed to the door, and let in Narcissa Malfoy. She was drenched to the bone by the spring rains, and there was only fear and grief on her features, as she rushed through, past Walburga’s screaming, to fall at Dumbledore’s feet, hands clasped in imploration. 

“Please,” she said, voice broken by tears. “The Lestrange Vaults - please, you must not activate it. She will die there. She will guard it to her death. There are children too,” she said hurriedly. “There are many children. Muggles! Innocents!” She clasped her fingers tight on Dumbledore’s robes, and looked up her face awash with tears. “Please, you are better than him. You have always been.” 

Minerva McGonagall looked troubled, and came to Narcissa, trying to help her up. Narcissa shook her off, and kept her eyes on Dumbledore. 

“It is beyond me, Narcissa,” Dumbledore said quietly. “The Muggle government wants an end to the war, at whatever cost. He must be…eliminated to satisfy their demands for safety. Can you bring her to surrender? Can you bring the heirloom to me? I can do my utmost to convince them of your cooperation.” 

“She is not a well woman,” Narcissa whispered. “You know that. You know she will only let you touch the cup over her grave.” Her voice hitched. “Please, you know enough to take her alive or dead. You must not—you must not let them do this to us.”

Dumbledore brought his brightly coloured handkerchief to her face, and gently wiped her tears off. 

“You must persuade her,” he said. “There is no other way.”

Narcissa looked broken and helpless, but she still managed to nod, and scrabbled to her feet, and she walked out a shadow of the woman she had once been. 

“She will try to kill her sister,” Remus said softly. “She cannot succeed, though. Dumbledore, let me run after her. Let me call her back. Let us send her to her husband. There is nothing she can do.”

“Bellatrix Lestrange has held her sister close,” Dumbledore said tiredly. “I despise it as much as you do, Remus, and yet it remains the only hope. We must trust that Bellatrix values her enough, that she sees reason, that she hands over the cup before the Muggle government takes action.”

“Where is he?” Minerva said then, angrily. “Where is he? He has not been seen in ages, but the war continues! Is he even alive? What are they fighting for? He cannot win, not anymore, not after the full power of the Muggle government came down upon him!” 

“He is all that remains to be defeated, to bring peace,” Dumbledore said, looking at the locket at Luna’s breast. “It does not matter whether it is Fiendfyre or a nuclear weapon - he will be destroyed. I care about doing that without hurting anyone else, without causing anyone else death or dismemberment. Hand me the locket, Luna. My hands are tied, and I must do what I can to save those who remain.” 

And saying that, Dumbledore stared through the locket, and looked at Harry, and there was only sorrow infinite in his gaze, as he imparted through magic what he could not through words.

Luna was crying, and her fingers shook as she unwound the locket from its chain and walked across to Dumbledore to hand it over. 

It was familiar, the grief and the pain, the sharp flare of fire and murder, and a soul blooming only to wither away, and Harry was not left even with the ashes of what had been once a man. 

Instead, he woke in his bed, alone and weeping, and he knew what to do. Dumbledore had told him in that final glance, hadn’t he? 

He was all that remained, apart from that cup. The Muggle government could take care of the cup, if Narcissa or Dumbledore failed to get there first. Harry, though, Harry was beyond Dumbledore’s reach, beyond the Muggle government’s reach. And though Voldemort had lost, the senseless war would continue as long as Harry remained as the last beacon between Voldemort and his well-deserved end. 

He tried to not think about a soul that had died to spare him multiple times, he tried not to think about Voldemort stripped bare before him, he tried not to think about all the confusing and blurred lines between them crafted of destiny and folly. 

He made the bed, tucking in the corners with care, as Petunia had taught him under the supervision of a cane. He walked over to the portrait of Grindelwald and his son. The son waved to him. Grindelwald, on the other hand, looked sombre. 

He dusted the portrait one last time. 

Then he walked up the circular stairs, to the ramparts, and spring was in full bloom, and the mountains were crowned by green as far as his eyes could see. He clambered on top of a watch-tower’s turret, and took a deep breath.

He would see Sirius soon. 

And, he thought treacherously, though he knew not why, he would see Voldemort too. Voldemort would die fast once he had lost Harry. This, he knew instinctively. 

So he jumped. 

The winds were cold, and the ground yawned wide to embrace him. And he was crying too, and then he ended up splinched, losing his arms both, and his body was bleeding and torn apart, and he ended up deep under waters green and slimy, and there was a strong, bony grip on his ankles.

Inferi. 

He panicked, and suffocated, and gulped down noisome slime, and tried to kick away. His strength prevailed, for once, and he broke the surface. Hastily, he kicked away to the edges of the lake, and threw himself on the land, panting. His hands were gone, and his body and head both raged red in pain as the Castle called him back. He was going to die raving mad, he realized. Perhaps the Inferi could be useful after all. It would be quick.

Turning back to the waters, he saw no Inferi. Instead, as Arthur’s Lady of the Lake once had, rose Voldemort, covered in green, and in his hand he held a staff of yew aloft. Dudley had believed in swamp monsters.

“I want to die,” Harry said, gritting his teeth through the pain unbearable as the Castle called him, as Voldemort drew nearer. “You cannot stop me everyday.”

“Come back into the lake,” Voldemort said irritably. “You were exposed to the nuclear contamination in Dumbledore’s wand. Radioactive contaminants will kill you, but not as fast as you would like.” 

Harry did not move. Then again, he thought, as Voldemort dragged him back in, Voldemort had not really offered him any choice, about anything, about life or death. 

“Please,” Harry asked again, thinking of Narcissa on her knees at Dumbledore’s feet, thinking of poor Luna, thinking of what Dumbledore’s helplessness would mean in the face of the Muggle government’s weapons, thinking of mushroom clouds blooming grey over Japanese cities. “Please let me die.” 

The water was cold and made his skin prickle. He was weighed down by the slime, and he bled so, and the Castle summoned him with pain and magic, and he rested his head on Voldemort’s shoulder for support.

“Tomorrow,” Voldemort lied, and kissed him.

Voldemort swung the staff of yew in a circle, and two broken hands, Harry’s hands, came to the lake. 

“Hold still; it will hurt,” Voldemort said. 

Everything hurt. And Harry was only a puppet there, crying and helpless, as Voldemort fixed him, as Voldemort kissed him again, as Voldemort brought staff to Harry’s left cheek reminding Harry of how he had once touched that wand of yew to a newborn babe’s cheek. 

“Please,” Harry implored, as the Castle squeezed his sanity and life away. “Please, you must see that you have lost. I will die with you. I won’t abandon you. This cannot continue - even you must see it!”

“Tomorrow,” Voldemort lied, and kissed him again. 

“One last night,” Voldemort lied, and he swirled his staff of yew again, and they were back on the ramparts of Harry’s castle. 

He dragged himself downstairs, and took off his clothes bogged down in slime, and washed himself clean with the water from that pitcher which never ran dry. 

Voldemort stood watching him. 

“We will conclude this tomorrow,” Harry said, trying to still the tremors in his voice. “Clean up.” He moved the pitcher to Voldemort’s side. “Clean up and join me in my bed.” 

Voldemort nodded. So Harry waited for him on his large bed, which had once been Grindelwald’s, and the moonlight streaked through, and the winds carried notes of spring’s fragrance. 

“Snowbells,” Voldemort murmured, as he slipped into Harry’s bed, beneath his sheets, nude as Harry wanted him. “I have always liked the scent of snowbells. They grow in the hollows, where winter still holds sway, and they are the last heralds of the dusk of winter, of that old and dead world.” 

“I like to think they signal the start of spring,” Harry said quietly, moving closer to Voldemort and letting his fingers trail Voldemort’s cheekbones and neck. 

“After all, what are endings but beginnings?” Voldemort said thoughtfully, as he closed his eyes to relax into Harry’s touch. 

“What would you like?” Harry asked. “Whatever you like.” 

“Whatever you can give me,” Voldemort said easily, sinking into Harry’s gaze and touch. “I only know of sex and power. You must teach me everything else.”

What did Harry know of everything else? Perhaps, he thought, as he remembered a soul that had kept him safe so many times, as he thought of Voldemort giving up a war, as he thought of Luna fierce, as he thought of his own reasons to want death, he knew more than he realized. He was only Harry, but that had sufficed so far. 

“Let me,” Harry whispered, and suited action to word. 

He touched gently and carefully, learning reactions, learning from each exhale and stuttered gasp, learning from limbs that twisted wild beneath his sheets, learning from a head thrown back to etch the body in moonlit profile. 

Greedily, he brought the sheets down, to watch everything, to touch everything, to luxuriate in the sight of Voldemort surrendered to him, and finding ebullient happiness in that despite the death that awaited him tomorrow. All that he had been, all that he was, had come down to this, and the truth was beautiful to him. 

"Only you," he whispered, bending to softly kiss Voldemort, and he did not feel squeamish or frightened when Voldemort deepened the kiss in fevered passion.

—— 

When he woke, he woke in the forest clearing where Vernon had abandoned him for good, and clasped loosely in his left hand was a staff of yew. He hastily got to his feet, and he looked around and saw none. And he delved into his heart, into his soul, and found himself alone, possessed by neither Castle nor captor. And he was crying as he brought his hand up to touch a scar that was no longer there.

 

———-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for giving the story a chance! I hope to wrap it up very soon.


	7. Agnisakshi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry grows a beard, in which Hermione takes up a scalpel, in which they all have their own places to stand.

The staff of yew was heavy in his palm. He leaned on it and shoved back the grief that rose deep in his chest when he remembered how Voldemort had broken the surface of that lake, standing alone and majestic among the green ripples, with the staff in his left hand, just as it stayed in Harry’s now. 

He had wondered about Voldemort’s wand. It had been missing for ages. Had it been somehow transferred into this staff? Why? 

He had no answers.  
He had no castle.

He had no scar. 

He trudged back to civilization, into the little town by the forest, and there at the petrol pump, a lady dropped her cigarette when she saw him. 

She screamed, and men rushed out of the barbershop nearby, and Harry clung to his staff, and twirled it as he had seen Voldemort do, and it spun him away, through glen and glade, through valley and wold, across moor and mountain, and left him at a graveyard quiet. 

Godric’s Hollow. 

He was before three graves white, and two he knew from his nightmares old, and the third made him sob. 

“Harry Potter, 1980-unknown”, it read. “The Last Wizard of England.” 

The staff in his hand was warm that cold night. And he wondered, for the first time, why there were Muggle children playing hopscotch among the graves. 

“Harry! Is that you? Is that truly you?”

He turned about swiftly, to see Hermione standing there, looking older and thinner, with a little bouquet of white lilies in her hands. She was wearing a jumper and faded jeans, and she looked pale as if she had seen a ghost, except he had seen her face down evil greater than that with nary a blink. 

“Hermione,” he croaked, and opened his arms wide for her, as she ran to him across the graves. The children giggled as they hugged and she pressed soft kisses to his cheeks, and she was sobbing, and it tore him up to hear her so broken. 

“Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t. I am so sorry.” 

“For running away from that pig? For hiding? For surviving the wars?” she asked, still weeping. “For keeping your magic? Whatever are you sorry for?” 

“For making you cry,” he said bleakly. 

He tried to focus on her. She was in his arms. He could do something to comfort her. Everything else was out of his control. 

“Could you conjure me those yellow birds I like?” she whispered, greed and wistfulness warring in her eyes. 

The children had wandered away. And it was just the two of them among those old graves. 

So he whispered that spell, and the staff lurched in his hand, and yellow birds that had once swooped out of her wand-tip in anger when Ron had fooled about with Lavender. She watched them swirl about her head, and she looked like a child at Christmas, with awe in her eyes. 

“Thank you,” she murmured, pulling herself together, watching the birds fly away over the woods. 

——-

She took him to London. 

“Most of us live in the refugee settlement that Minerva McGonagall set up,” she filled him in. “Without magic, most dwellings and establishments became inaccessible, or fell into ruins.” 

She sighed and took his arm as they walked across the Bridge. 

“Those who were born into that world…Harry, they did not come to terms with the loss. Some went raving mad, some committed suicide, some wound up addicted to alcohol, gambling, drugs or other coping methods. They had little knowledge of Muggle trades, and little inclination to learn.” 

They had reached a large monastery. 

“Southwark Cathedral Priory,” Hermione announced, and squeezed his hand in reassurance, as she led him up the stairs. 

Then she turned at the large, wooden doors to face him and asked quietly, “Would you mind staying in my room tonight? I think it will be better to meet everyone at breakfast. I don't want you to be overwhelmed.”

He nodded assent. 

So he was in a narrow room, with its narrow bed, and he smiled sadly when he saw the sugar-free sweets on the bedside table. Hermione had stolen into the kitchen to make him tea, and then had hugged him goodnight, before falling asleep on the bed, untroubled. He sat down at her small desk, and flipped idly through the books on medicine. Good, old Hermione, never letting circumstances get the better of her, always striving. He was overcome with fondness and watched her sleeping form in peace. Then he turned away to look at the few pieces of memorabilia scattered across her desk. 

There was a spindly glass instrument. It had no magic in it. 

There was a galleon that Harry remembered proudly from their DA days. It had no magic in it.

There was a pair of Keeper’s gloves. Ron.

There was a photograph of the three of them. 

There was a golden snitch, wrapped in a red Gryffindor scarf, and it smelled like time and tears. He opened the scarf flat, and saw a thin wand of holly lying fallow there, and by it was a legal document. Tears rose to his eyes as he opened the document to read the proceedings of child abuse and neglect Hermione had initiated against the Dursleys. 

She had always been better than the rest of them, and bringing justice to a man she thought dead had still been important to her even in the middle of the losses she had been reeling under. 

There was a small handheld mirror and a compact at the corner of the desk. He held it up to his face, curious as to what he would see, after all those months. 

And he gasped silently, and cast a guilty glance to make sure that he had not woken Hermione, and turned back to the mirror again. 

Staring at a him was a man with a shock of grey hair, and there were lines deep on his brow, and his cheeks were not hollow for the first time that he remembered. He looked old and well-fed, and he was taken aback to see his eyes. He remembered seeing only insecurity, anger, and perpetual fear in them. And he saw only the same expression he had noticed in Grindelwald’s eyes ever so often. 

Longing. 

—— 

Hermione’s hair was a bushy riot in the morning, and he was laughing as she fought with her tresses with much grumbling. 

“I have missed you,” he said honestly, as she thwacked him on his hand with a hairbrush. 

She rolled her eyes good-naturedly, and straightened his collar. 

“You look so old,” she complained. “And you were not even fighting a war!”

In her eyes was concern and fear. 

He pressed a soft kiss to her forehead, and said, “Thank you for everything. For the Dursleys. For being strong enough to study medicine and to make a life for yourself.”

“My parents are well off,” she muttered. “And they have connections in the medical community. It was only logical to pursue that as a career, given the state I found myself in.” 

“Tell me more, please,” he asked her, curious as to where she was studying, curious as to how many exams she had outstripped her peers in. 

“Well,” she began, a tad smugly. “Imperial College.” 

“Of course,” he said, laughing. 

“I plan to complete in four years,” she rattled on. “And I will do my residency at Leeds. Then I will specialize as a neurosurgeon, and set up my office at Harley street.”

How he loved her!  
“No dentistry?” 

“I loathe dentistry!” she said with feeling. 

He was standing there, content to bask in her successes, when she sighed and said, “Breakfast, Harry. Don't get upset…some of them can have very strong reactions.”

“I am ready,” he said, though he wasn’t. 

“Don’t tell them about the magic,” she said hesitantly. “Many of them…many of them have not been quite the same after all that happened.”

So he left the staff under Hermione’s bed. 

“And you must tell me everything later about your girlfriend!” she said wickedly. 

“What?” he asked, shocked. 

“Don’t lie, Harry!” she retorted. “I can see through you as easily as glass. I don’t need magic for that. You are in love.”

“Am I?” he asked, reeling as he thought of Voldemort sprawled over his sheets in the castle, as he thought of Voldemort with his snow-flecked robes upon the ramparts old. 

“Of course you are,” she said fondly, opening the door and chivvying him out. “Only a fool would miss that. You always did wear your heart on your sleeve.”

And Harry thought of Snape saying that. And of Sirius. And of Dumbledore. Somehow, he knew, asking about those who he wanted to ask about, would only cause them both pain. 

So he followed her lead and walked down the shabby, damp corridors.

The dining room was large and long, and they had started breakfast, and as one, everyone looked up at him, and there were startled shouts and gasps. 

“Harry Potter!” whispered Minerva, and her hair was pure white, and while her bearing was still regal and determined, there was grief stamped over her careworn features. 

“Professor,” he said, and his voice was shaking. 

There was Remus and Tonks. There was Andromeda and Fleur. 

George and Fred. Percy. Mundungus. Arthur and Molly. Molly hugged him tight and cried, and Harry had no words to console. 

“Let the boy breathe,” Minerva said quietly, still looking at him as if he was only a trick of her eyes, as if he would break and waft into nothingness if she looked away. 

Remus filled him in, between orange juice and toast.

The nuclear weapons had worked to break the vault. They had succeeded in destroying the horcrux. They had succeeded in destroying a great deal of other stuff too. That was their nature, and everyone had known the risk. 

Draco Malfoy had committed suicide when he had heard of his mother’s fate in those vaults. 

He had been the first, but he certainly had not been the last. As radiation swept across the country, though it had been a contained and controlled attack deep in the vaults of Gringotts, it had disabled wizards and witches, goblins and vampires, werewolves and centaurs, and house-elves and ghosts. 

Nobody had seen a Magical creature in Britain since. There was no magic left. It had been wiped clean from Britain, and some said that it had wiped magic from all of Europe, and from the eastern coast of the Americas as well. 

All the tests Dumbledore had run before had been only regarding death and dismemberment, about containing damage and sparing lives. He had not, nobody had, thought about the consequences on magic itself. 

He had had a stroke as soon as he realized the aftermath.

“He died fast,” Remus said quietly. There was sadness on his face, but there was also a practical acceptance, borne of many deaths and tidings of despair. 

Others had followed. Some fast, committing suicide, and some slowly, through vices that had taken their lives or livelihoods. Some had died on the streets, penniless. Some had been committed to sanatoriums. 

Hermione still visited Ron regularly at the sanatorium, once every week, and tried her best to stay composed and cheerful when she came back. 

“Luna?” Harry asked, fearing what he would hear. 

“She was a child of magic,” Remus said softly. There was more he was refusing to say, Harry could tell. “This is not a world she could have lived in.” 

Harry remained in the house that day, and he watched the bustling activities. Many of them were studying hard for various entry-level jobs in the Muggle world. Remus was teaching basic courses in accounting. Tonks was experimenting with Japanese cooking. Arthur was glued to his computer, and coding fiercely. 

And Harry thought of Hermione, at the Imperial College, surely moving through the ranks with her customary dedication and intelligence. 

Minerva was reading a book. Measure for Measure. She looked up, sensing his gaze on her.

“Some by sin rise, and some by virtue fall,” she quoted glibly.

He thought of Dumbledore. He thought of Grindelwald. 

And he refused to think about Voldemort.

“They say that Albus smuggled you away to Venezuela to keep you safe while the war raged on here.” 

Harry didn't reply. 

“Hermione, Ron, and Hagrid never stopped searching,” she said quietly. “Even after Hagrid went missing, and after Ron was committed, Hermione continued. She went to Venezuela and found no trace of you. She came back, defeated, and still determined. Finally, on your birthday this year, she gave up, and dug a grave for you in Godric’s Hollow. She visited the grave every week, just as she visits Ron every week.” 

“I hope she finds her life away from all of this,” Harry said fervently. “She deserves much better than what she has had so far.” 

“I will make sure of it,” Minerva said wryly. “Whatever is in my power will be done, as long as I live, and I intend to live until all of them are settled.” She cast a glance at everyone she sheltered. 

And her brand of protection was not Dumbledore’s. It was not an alchemy between the mind and the heart as his had been. It was only her heart, noble and weary, and yet indefatigable. She would win no wars, but she would see her flock safe.

Remus joined them then, and said wearily, “Mr. Malfoy here to see Harry, Minerva. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.” 

“Yes, well, best show him in,” she said, with a glint of wry humor in her eyes. “He would only have our concerned neighbors call the bobbies again with his peculiar manner of dress and speech.” 

Remus shook his head and walked out. 

“Lucius still carries on as if nothing has changed,” Minerva informed Harry. “Best humor him. He has an unlimited supply of funds stashed away in his Swiss accounts, and he does donate well when he has a mind to.” 

Harry had not known what to expect. Yet, it had not been this. Lucius Malfoy had a stoop, and he had his cane still, and he wore flowing black robes, and his haughty face was from an age past, when he had been steeped in magic foul and old, when he had been a spiteful man who had mistreated his servants and double-crossed his master too.

Yet, in his eyes was only denial.

“Mr. Potter,” he said, looking at Harry much the way Minerva had looked at him. 

“I want to speak with him alone,” Lucius told Minerva haughtily. 

She did not move.

“I will make it worth your while!” he announced. 

She sat there, with her small smile. 

“Oh fine!” he exclaimed. “I will fund Nymphadora’s studies!” 

“Thank you, Mr. Malfoy. You are, as always, kind.” 

That smile of hers reminded Harry very much of what her Animagus form had been. 

“Mr. Malfoy is allergic to rock music, Harry,” she told him, as she swept out of the room. “If he gets unruly, just sing a few verses of Led Zeppelin, and he will cause you no trouble.” 

“Oh, for the sake of-” Lucius complained, but she had shut the door behind her, and they were alone. 

“Now!” Lucius said, advancing scarily close to Harry. 

He had shot up in his time of imprisonment. They were of an equal height, and he found that unsettling. Mr. Malfoy had always been tall and forbidding, and oozing malice, in Harry’s memories.

Lucius’s eyes were on Harry’s scar, or where the scar should have been.

“Where is he?” Lucius asked. “What did you do to him?” 

“What did he do to me?” Harry said testily. 

Lucius did not budge. He did not back away. He stared Harry down with gimlet eyes, until Harry said softly, “I don’t think he is alive, Mr. Malfoy.”

Lucius’s composure cracked for a moment, and Harry saw a glimpse of a man grieving his son and wife, his life and heritage, before he recouped and summoned his denial again.

“Don’t be silly, boy,” he said condescendingly. “He was not in Britain at the time.”

Harry was sure of that too. Voldemort had been in his bed, in his arms, in his spell, at that time. 

“Nevertheless, Mr. Malfoy, I don't think-”

“Now you listen!” Lucius said, his voice having lost none of its sinisterness. “You have magic still. I can sense it. What do you think they will do to you if they sense it too?”

“They won’t harm me,” Harry said weakly. 

“Did you hear about why your friend was committed? Did you hear about how Albus Dumbledore died?” 

“Don’t tell me,” Harry said, knowing that the next few words would break him. 

“Did Remus tell you his story of the stroke? He was always a kind man. They tore him apart, you see, because he still had magic in him. He had been a powerful man, and they had been insane with grief over what they had lost, and they had seen no reason as they ripped his robes away, as they ripped his limbs away, as they gouged him to death, drinking of his blood, eating of his flesh, desperately wanting to claim what magic was in him. By the time Minerva and Remus managed to pull them off, there was nothing much left of him.” 

Harry sat down heavily, kept his gaze fixed on the windows, and watched the busy Londoners walking past the house.

“Harry Potter,” Lucius said quietly. “Did you know why they inscribed what they did on your grave?” 

The Last Wizard, they had written.

“Hermione Granger gave up her search on your birthday, and took out advertisements in newspapers to publish notices of your death. She found out what had happened to Dumbledore, and she wanted you dead, in public memory, so that you were spared what had befallen your Headmaster.” 

“She told you that I had returned.” 

“Yes. She wanted enough money to make sure that you could start life over somewhere else. This country is not safe for you. It will never be.”

“Why did you come, Mr. Malfoy?” 

“He was always an odd creature, no doubt,” Lucius said softly. “I did not know what to make of him. Wrathful and proud, and yet capable of mercy too. Mind you, whatever I thought of him, whatever I made of him, was of no avail to me. I had been born into service, thanks to what my father had sworn. Yet, I noticed his ways, over the years, and there was both curiosity and necessity motivating my observations.” He looked at Harry sharply, and Harry felt flayed by that gaze. “I saw him giving up a war he could have waged for considerably longer. I saw him on his knees and clinging to the bannister as Dumbledore killed his soul once and more than once. I asked no questions. It was not my place, and I had to survive for my family.”

“Why would he give up a war and chase defeat as ardently as a man ever chased a lover?” Lucius wondered. “You were missing and Dumbledore did not know where you were. And the Dark Lord was missing too, and he came back often smelling of Eastern Europe, of beeches old.”

Lucius walked to the window and watched a mother chiding her boy for running on the streets.

“The last time I saw him, Mr. Potter, he smelled of snowbells.” 

“When your Miss Granger searched for you in Venezuela, I buried my son. Then I took a train to Europe, and I traversed village and vale, listening and watchful. My travels took me to the Carpathians.” 

He turned back to look at Harry. 

“Sit down, boy. You look set to faint.” 

Harry sat down, and his hands were clammy. 

“My father had told me frightening tales of Nurmengard. In the daylight, it was only a castle. It was deserted, but for the herds of chamois that thrived in the forests. And I sensed magic. Magic had stayed here, safe from the radiation that had killed it off everywhere else in Europe, and I wondered what the walls were made of. A part of the Castle had been burned away by Fiendfyre. I wondered if the Dark Lord had finally conquered his fear of death, or if that had been your pyre.” 

Harry thought of Voldemort kissing him, and declaring promises for tomorrow, and he thought of Voldemort saving him, one last time, and breaking that bond of prophecy and fate which had held them together. 

“It was not my pyre,” he said hoarsely. 

“I can see that,” Lucius said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “My wife died in the vaults, Mr. Potter. She died there because her sister was guarding his soul, because she loved her sister despite everything. Hundreds died, and we lost our magic, because he fled away with you.”

“Was it his fault? Was it Dumbledore’s? Was it the Muggle government’s?” Harry asked. “What does it matter now?”

There was no reply. They remained there, staring at each other, and lost in their own thoughts. 

“He did not die in Nurmengard, Mr. Potter,” Lucius said finally. 

He sagged against the window, and continued in a quieter voice, “Britain is not safe for you.” 

“Why did Hermione come to you?” 

Lucius did not give an answer. Harry walked out, and slunk into Hermione’s room. He sat at her desk, and looked at the photo of three of them. 

——-

 

When the door creaked open hours later, Hermione found him in the last rays of the evening, crying silently with the photo cradled in his palms. 

“Oh, Harry!” she said sadly, coming to him and gently squeezing his arm. “I hadn’t realized he would visit you immediately.” 

“How do you know him?” 

“He was at the sanatorium often, because there are a few mad Death Eaters there, and he was paying for their care.” She sighed and sat on her bed, looking at Harry as if he would condemn her. How could he? 

“Go on,” he said softly, not wanting to spook her. 

“Well, he told me that I had to move on, from…from Ron, from searching for you. I thought it was merely practical advice. Then he said that I wouldn’t find you in South America. I didn't believe him. I went there, searching for you. When I came back, he summoned me to a pub, and he told me over vodka that you were most likely alive, and that you had not lost your magic, and that if I found you and brought you home, Dumbledore’s fate would be yours too.”

She brought her hands to cover her face, and said through tears, “I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was right. So I buried you, declared you dead…and resolved not to search for you anymore. Harry, I am so sorry!”

He quickly leapt to his feet and went to her, to kneel before her quaking form and hug her to him. 

“You did what you could!” he assured her. “You weren’t wrong! We both know that.”

“What do we do now?” she asked quietly, worry darkening her tear-stained face. “Somebody will find out. Many of them are still sensitive to magic, I think. After what happened to Dumbledore…”

Harry thought about Dumbledore’s wand, about how he had wanted to possess it as he had claimed the Castle, and he thought about each of its bearers felled down viciously by fate. 

“You have to leave,” she said stoically, though she looked heartbroken. 

“And you have to make your life away from all this,” he told her gently, cupping her cheeks. There was knowing in her gaze, but she was in denial. 

“Ron won’t come back, you won’t marry him, and nobody here will be as before without magic,” Harry said quietly, emphasizing each word despite the hurt he knew he was inflicting on her. “And unlike all of them, you have a better chance of educating yourself, of integrating yourself into the Muggle society, of making a beautiful life for yourself.” 

She was crying again. 

“Hermione, you wanted to belong. You wanted friends.” 

He remembered the troll and the little, lonely girl that Ron and he had saved, that everyone had mocked for her bookishness and studiousness. She had been insecure about her looks, about her worth as a friend, about being Harry’s second-best friend despite everything she had done for him, about Ron’s love, and about so many other matters. How hadn’t he seen that before? She was only a young girl who was not sure of her place in the world, despite her determination to carry on and be brave, to continue being just and to fight against all evil. 

Was he the best person to tell her what she was? No. He had not truly seen her before. Yet, he was the only one left. Who else did she have?

He held her to him and said softly, “I am so proud of everything you have done. For me, for Ron, for everyone. You must stop, though. You must take your life in your hands and stop sacrificing your time and energy on the behalf of people who can never return to you as they were, as you loved them.” 

“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted in a thin voice. “I have always worked for you, to keep you safe, to read books that you didn’t want to read, to study what you skipped, to organize people for your causes.” 

“You are studying medicine at the Imperial College, Hermione,” he told her wryly. “You don’t need me to be motivated. Let Lucius Malfoy bankroll you. Get your degrees, and then walk away from all of this.”

He could see her future, clearer than Trelawney ever had. He could see her brilliant and formidable, saving lives and teaching students. He could see her campaigning for reforming the NHS. He could see her life and legacy laid out before many as an inspiration. An Ada Lovelace of her times.

“Where will you go?” 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He bent to extricate his staff from beneath her bed. 

“May this scarf always keep you warm,” he wished, and his old Gryffindor scarf flew to her neck, and she gasped in surprise at the warmth. 

“May this Snitch always light up for you in the darkness,” he wished, and the old Snitch he had once lifted exultantly to the cheering Gryffindor stands gleamed bright gold and flew to her. 

“Oh, Harry-”

“I don’t know any spell for my next wish,” he admitted. “May you always be loved, safe, and content.” 

———

He followed his heart.

It took him east, across the Channel, across the lush meadows of France, into the arid summer of Spain. From there, he crossed the Strait of Gibraltar on a small fishing ship.

Morocco was full of colors and music, and he walked away, to Algeria. He did not linger there, heading to Libya where there were rival gangs fighting on the streets, and he crossed borders once more, to Egypt, and he heard drunken tales of Solomon’s tryst with Sheba. 

Onwards, he trudged, and entered the promised land of milk and honey, and found wars raging over oil and gods. He paid no need though, and walked through shelled buildings and refugee camps, pausing only to sleep and gauge his bearings. 

He saw Iraq, the cradle of the Persian civilization, fallen from its old glories. He ate dates and listened to tales of Zoroaster. 

Then he entered the mountains of Afghanistan, and saw tribal warlords enacting cruel justice on each other, and saw boys with old Soviet rifles hunting down nimble mountain goats. Little wonder that they had called the country the graveyard where empires came to die. 

The Himalayas were majestic. They were formidable. The staff kept him. The staff kept him safe. And his heart led him on. 

He crossed via the Khyber Pass as many conquering armies before had. He heard tales of Babur and Humayun. And he was overcome by nature’s majesty when he reached Gaumukh, cradled in the mountains, the glacier that gave birth to the mighty Ganges. 

From there, he followed the river, and she grew in girth, and there were pilgrims flocking to those towns. They burned bodies by the river and floated the ashes with chanting and tears. They stripped bare and blew conches, and stood like trees in the river’s eddies, praying for salvation. They littered her, with ashes and offal, with plastic and hair. There was only saffron and white, and the river carried on, determined to wash away sins and grime both. 

Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath. He wondered if he too would be saved, on completing that holy trail towards moksha. 

He performed his ablutions in the river, as did everyone else. He ate wheat rotis, and drank milk. He slept in the temples that offered pilgrims a place for the night. He saw whores and gurus, he saw widows abandoned, and he saw little children begging for alms. 

His beard and hair had grown, and he suspected that he looked like the hundreds of mendicants that thronged these roads, for often kind women gave him food or alms, pressing him to accept even if he tried to decline, requesting him to bless their children. 

So he blessed them, and wondered how much more of a charlatan he could be. Then again, he thought to himself often, at least he was not ripping them off by exploiting their faith and goodwill. He saw unscrupulous sadhus everyday who trapped guileless men and women into their webs of deceit. For every devoted servant of Lord Shiva or Lord Ram, there were tens of charlatans. 

His feet were bleeding as he climbed the great Swargarohini, the mountain that overlooked Badrinath. None had climbed that peak, the locals had said. None could. For after all, was it not the path to heaven itself? The mighty Pandavas had climbed that mountain, and had one by one expired on its reaches. 

Snow fell heavy on the slopes, and the vista before him was white and pure, and he leaned heavily on his staff. 

His heart was full. And he struggled onwards despite the fading light and the storm on the horizon. He had seen a sherpa earlier, warning him to turn back. This mountain had killed many, after it had killed the Pandavas. 

He heard the rumble before he saw it. Visibility was poor, and he had never had particularly good vision. He felt the winds turn against him, and the first cascade of the avalanche crashing down the slopes. 

When he screamed, he screamed for Voldemort.

——

He woke to pain, and he woke to a familiar face. It was shorn of surety and had only worry. 

“Hello,” he tried to croak groggily, and found that he could not do that very well. 

“Don’t,” Voldemort said, sounding irritated and tired. “You broke your spine.”

“Hold still,” Voldemort ordered. 

Harry did not, reaching out blindly to cup his face. 

“Hold still!” Voldemort said, moving from irritated to angry. 

So he let Voldemort drug him with a concoction of ganja, familiar to Harry from the many nights he had spent with the sadhus by the Ganges, and he wafted off into dreams. 

When he woke, he found Voldemort watching him quietly, and there was soft wonder writ across his features. 

“I will always find you,” Harry promised. 

“Your beard looks ghastly.” 

“Come lie down with me.” 

They were in a cave, and the storm was still fierce outside. Trust Voldemort to find a place inhospitable and still stay warm with his perfect air conditioning spells. 

“Come lie down with me,” he told Voldemort again. 

“I see you didn’t marry that buxom blonde.” 

Luna had died, he hoped. Nobody had spoken of her fate, and he had no strength to find out. It was in his past, and there was nothing he could do anymore, except find his place in the world. 

As Dumbledore had been fond of saying, they all had their places to stand. And Harry knew where his was. 

“Don’t be silly,” Harry said, and the look of surprise on Voldemort’s face made his heart lighter. “I only have you left.”

“I was all that you ever had,” Voldemort corrected him. 

Maybe that was true too. Did it matter? Harry knew what he knew, and he knew his truth. 

“Lie down with me, please.” 

“Why did you Apparate into the middle of a snowstorm?” 

“I walked from London to the snowstorm.” 

Voldemort looked at him in horror, and his face melted into confusion, and he cleared his throat and drugged Harry again. 

When Harry surfaced again, Voldemort was asleep, lying beside him, though he had left distance of a few inches between them. They were lying on yak fur, and it smelled. Harry shifted closer to Voldemort, and smelled a scent that he remembered in the Castle. 

He dared touch Voldemort’s face, hoping that he would not wake by the Ganges again, bereft of dreams that provided him comfort, and found that Voldemort did not melt away into nothingness. He was solid flesh under Harry’s palm, and he woke, and the frank, searing look of longing on his face lingered a moment before he masked it with irritability. 

“Don’t get rid of me again,” Harry told him quietly, not removing his hand from its place on Voldemort’s cheek. “I will come back. I will always find you.” 

“You wanted to die,” Voldemort said, in a brittle voice, stripped of his usual certainty in speech. 

“You tried to immolate yourself,” Harry said fiercely. 

“It didn’t work. Nothing worked.” Voldemort closed his eyes. “I jumped from the highest peaks. I drowned myself. I set myself on fire multiple times. I sought death in so many forms. To think that I had been once craven, that I had safeguarded my life beyond what any man before me had done…perhaps it was fate. Around here, they do love speaking of karma and moksha.”

“It wasn’t fate. It was only love. How could you die when you were so fiercely loved?” 

His body was reeling from pain, and his head was muddled by Voldemort’s supply of ganja, and yet he prevailed in dragging Voldemort to him. They did not speak again, and Harry found it was the easiest sleep he had sunken into after that night in the Carpathians. 

——

“You followed me,” Voldemort said, when Harry woke again. 

“Drink,” he was ordered. 

It was soup. It tasted of game. 

“Geese soup,” Voldemort said. “It is very popular among the sherpas. Sometimes they leave it at the mouth of the cave for the sadhu who lives here.” 

“You are now a patron saint of the mountain climbers?” Harry asked, amused, and trying not to laugh at the aghast expression on Voldemort’s face. 

“They kept dying on the slopes,” Voldemort muttered. “It was disrupting my ganja supply.” 

“What is this cave? Did you make it?” 

“I am only a hermit crab,” Voldemort said, half-deprecatingly. “I stole a castle from Grindelwald. I stole this cave from a dead man.” 

“Did you kill him?” Harry wondered, in alarm. 

“He died many thousands of centuries ago,” Voldemort said, in his usual didactic teaching tones. “His name was Vyasa, and they say that he wrote the Mahabharata here, in this very cave.” 

“The pilgrims spoke of Vyasa residing in the mountains again,” Harry remembered. 

They had fanciful, fireside tales. He had not usually paid attention to them. 

“You likely partook too much of their ganja,” Voldemort criticised. “I knew you were always easily influenced. I did not realize that it brought you as low as to take tales of reincarnation seriously.”

“You took many people to Grindelwald,” Harry said quietly, and Voldemort fell silent at that. Harry had so many days to think. He had pieced everything together, going over his recollections of Grindelwald and of Voldemort. “You paid dearly for that castle, because he was a vindictive man, because he mocked you for what you were whenever you had sex with him. All the love he had for his son, turned to hate for you.”

“He made me act the whore,” Voldemort said, looking away. “I have done many compromises in my life, and regretted none.” 

“You wanted to find someone strong and pure, so that he would be content with fucking them, so that they could own him, and you could own them.” 

“I didn’t-”

“No, you didn’t find me for that purpose. Many had died at his hands by then. He had broken them. You had given up hope of resolving that. So you kept him amused, and kept the castle. The castle was becoming increasingly important, because of what you knew about Dumbledore’s collaborations with the government.”

“The castle was proof to radioactivity. The stones were hewn of magic and blood.” 

Harry had guessed as much.

“So you took me there, because you didn’t know where else to take me, because you were losing a war, and you didn’t care about that, because you wanted to keep your magic.”

Voldemort did not reply.

“And then you discovered my tendency to possess.” 

“I warned you about that stupidity.” 

“Yes, but you also saw your solution to Grindelwald. He was fascinated by me.”

“You liked him,” Voldemort said defensively. “You asked for him.” 

“Yes.” He had wanted Grindelwald’s company, even if he had been frightened that it would mean sexual advances he did not want. 

“It was perfect, though, wasn’t it? For you? You had always owned me. And when I owned the castle, you had no reason to keep him alive.” 

“It is absurdly simple,” Voldemort muttered. “There is no need to belabor your findings.” 

It was absurdly simple, indeed. Voldemort had, somewhere along the way, become accepting of his defeat in the war, become resigned to a life away from power. And he had feared loneliness. He had clung to Harry then. Harry was all that remained. 

And when Harry had decided to end it all, Voldemort had panicked. Somewhere along the line, his phobia of death had been replaced by a phobia of loneliness.

“There was more to it than that,” Voldemort said then, sharp of tone and unyielding. 

Yes, there had been more. There had been more between them. Why else would Voldemort have decided to save Harry at the expense of that final horcrux? 

Harry dragged himself up, trying not to pressure his healing spine, and kissed Voldemort softly. 

“I followed you,” Harry confessed. “I followed my heart.” 

——

“What do you do here?” 

“I meditate, I save stupid sherpas lost on the slopes, I drink their offerings of soup, and I think of you fucking blonde, big-busted women.”

“For God’s sake, I can’t get it up and you know it,” Harry said dryly. 

“I claim no logic to my ways.” 

Neither did Harry, now that he thought of it. He had followed his heart across ocean and desert, mountain and river, until he had found it in a snowstorm on the mountain that led to heaven. 

“Let us go home.” 

“Even I cannot protect you in London,” Voldemort replied lazily, skimming his fingers in curiosity over Harry’s arm. 

“Nurmengard,” Harry corrected him, and shivered as goosebumps woke under Voldemort’s touches. 

“I burned it down.” 

“You didn’t succeed.”

“That castle is like you,” Voldemort grumbled. “Resilient to anything I do.” 

He did not say anything more, curiosity taking hold of him whole, as he traced his fingers up Harry’s collarbones. 

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asked. “I don't know. I thought of it a great deal. I have little else to do here.”

“You were meditating, you told me.” 

“My thoughts fled to you, always.” 

“What did you think of?” 

“I didn’t have the chance to discover what you liked,” Voldemort said. “I didn't know if you hated the thought of sexual contact. I thought about your cock. I wondered what it would be like, if I took you in my hands, in my mouth, in me. Then I rid myself of fantasies, or strived to, because I realized that you did not welcome sexual intimacy in the little I knew of you.”

Harry had thought of sex a great deal on his travels. He had thought about sex, and about his past, about why he was so cold to the thought of physical intimacy. 

“I don’t think I am functional, sexually,” Harry told him gently, not wanting to disappoint him, and yet wanting to be honest. 

Voldemort blinked, and looked at him askance. Oh, he had not expected Harry to be broken sexually. He had only thought that it was a matter of time, perhaps.

Trying to find the right words, Harry said, “I don’t think I want to have sex.” 

“What do you mean?” Voldemort asked. “We had sex, more than once.” 

Harry thought of Voldemort splayed open on his sheets, surrendered to passion, and of how much joy the sight had brought him. 

“Is it enough?” Harry asked, worried. “Don’t you need more?” 

He knew what men did with men. Voldemort had not shown much evidence of abstinence or sexual dysfunction. He must surely want all of what was possible at some point. 

“Whatever you wish to give me. Have I asked you for more?”

“No, but I thought you were being patient, and waiting for more.” 

“I don’t know what you mean by more,” Voldemort told him acerbically. “I came to you, only knowing of sex and power. Whatever else I know of this, you showed me.” 

“I am talking of sex,” Harry clarified, and placed his hand between Voldemort’s legs in emphasis. Voldemort parted his legs in invitation and let Harry explore at will. 

“You have little drive or desire to wank. I don’t care. You find me erotic, whatever that means to you. I find you erotic. Your touches, your kisses, your gaze, your voice. Whatever are you concerned about?”

Harry was not concerned about anything then. He leaned forward, over Voldemort, and cupped his head, and kissed him many times across his face, across his cheeks and brow.

“Harry, Harry.” 

“Good, I want to hear only my name, if you must speak at all,” Harry said fiercely, thinking of magic and castles, thinking of love and fate, thinking of the travels that had brought them here, of one following his grief and another following his heart. 

“Take off your clothes. Your air-conditioning is still as good as it was. You will be warm. Take off your clothes. For me.” 

And then he looked. Let the pilgrims believe what they wanted about the reincarnation of a saint who had written the greatest epic of their world. Harry knew the truth. He knew the truth of the man splayed underneath him, he knew of the truth of them. 

Voldemort’s hands were in his hair, in his beard, tangled in his chest hair, and skittishly jumping across his skin in an undirected, uncoordinated manner. 

“I find you beautiful,” Harry confessed, as Voldemort sunk into his touches as gracefully as he once had. “I find you a miracle hewn of magic and love.” He traced the contours of Voldemort’s body, finding it spare and thin, and yet supple and strong in form. “You once called me an eldritch creature. What am I to make of you then? I watched you born of blood and bones and flesh. I watched you rise from that lake having crafted my staff out of your wand.”

“You understood,” Voldemort whispered then, looking across Harry at the staff of yew.

It had taken Harry many months to understand. He had figured it out finally. It truly had been that lake. It had been Avalon. As the Lady had come out with Excalibur, Voldemort had come out with the staff of yew. Great magic came out of great sacrifices, and he had given up his wand. 

“It was trivial,” Voldemort said. “I did not need a wand.” 

It was not trivial, Harry knew. He had seen Riddle’s face in Ollivander’s shop. He had seen Voldemort cradling his wand as if he was welcoming a long-lost child, during that night of the cauldron. 

“Shut up,” Harry told him. “All I want to hear, if you must speak at all, is my name.” 

Voldemort lapsed into silence then, until it was broken by soft gasps and groans, as he surrendered to Harry’s care. 

“If I had my way, I would have you like this, everyday.” 

Voldemort was too far gone in his passion to react to Harry’s words, but react he did to Harry’s fierce kiss, crashing into Harry’s arms with his name spoken twice. 

“You have your way,” Voldemort said, as they lay there on the yak furs, smelling of sweat and semen. Harry had been rubbing the sticky fluids firmly onto Voldemort’s skin, as silly as any juvenile lover could be. 

“My way?” 

Oh, then Harry remembered. Embarrassed, he shook his head. 

“You do have your way, whenever you choose to,” Voldemort said sleepily. “And I prefer it so. We can return to your castle. Thy kingdom cometh, thy will be done.” 

——- 

They left that land of mysticism and snow, and Harry clutched his staff tight as Voldemort spun them into whorls of magic and time, and they found themselves on ramparts old and strong. 

Magic seared itself through Harry’s veins and he knelt to touch the stones fondly.

“Must you possess all that you touch?” Voldemort said half-heartedly, turning his gaze to Harry from the snowbells that crept blooming through the woods. 

Harry laughed, and rose to his feet, and came to Voldemort. Amusement fled away leaving only solemnity in Voldemort’s eyes. 

“All that I touch,” Harry declared, and embraced the man.

——

Later, when Harry left Voldemort exhausted and asleep on his bed, he walked to the portrait of Grindelwald and his son. 

The boy waved, and Harry waved back. 

Grindelwald looked angry and sad. 

“I wish you hadn’t taken it out on him,” Harry said forlornly. 

He knew the secrets of the castle, and he knew the lows that Grindelwald had dragged his captor to. Voldemort was not Harry, and had not been affected by any of it the way Harry had been affected by Vernon. Harry was glad for that. He grieved quietly, still, for what had happened in this castle.

“You were kind to me, until you tried to kill me, and even why you wanted to kill me was understandable,” Harry said. 

He thought of Dumbledore, ripped apart by his own students. He thought of Grindelwald, falling like a puppet at the end of a flash of green. He thought of a cave in a mountain that led to heaven, and of following his heart there. 

“Come back to bed, Harry,” Voldemort summoned. “I am cold.” 

“You cannot be,” Harry said, arguing for the sake of an argument. “Your spells are perfect. They worked perfectly even on top of your avalanche-ridden mountain.” 

Voldemort shifted up to a half-rise, braced on his elbows, and the sheets fell gathered about his waist, draped artfully by accident, and Harry wondered at his beauty in the cold moonlight. 

“I think I will just stand here and look at you,” he admitted. 

He smiled as his sudden burst of admiration earned him that look of incredulity as it often did. 

“Shall I return to my sleep, or do you require me to be awake for this moon-touched inspection?”

He loved Voldemort’s clever ways with the spoken word. Traveling as he had, he had come to understand and appreciate clever usage of words better. Moon-touched. Moon-struck. A tad not right in the head. 

“If I am moon-touched, what are you?” 

“A poor man, bereft of lover, alone in a large bed, shivering and awaiting succour.” 

Harry laughed, warm and open, and he registered with pleasure the contentment on Voldemort’s features on hearing the sound of his laughter. He shook his head, and his heart thumped in gladness as he returned to the bed, and took his lover into his arms. 

“You have never waited for succour,” Harry retorted. Voldemort was self-sufficient, had always been. “You have never needed it either.” 

“On the contrary,” Voldemort said, kissing him and coiling limbs about him easily. 

He fell asleep fast, as was his nature. Harry stayed awake, his lover’s limbs heavy on his body, and he held the sleeping form tight to him. 

When the sun swept away the night, it shone on them too, and Harry watched the stirring man in his arms. 

“It is frightening,” he confessed quietly. “To have everything right here, in my hold. What if-”

“There are no more what-ifs, no more that can be altered by fate or man,” Voldemort told him. “This is us. This is our coda.” 

Harry badly wanted to believe. He could, couldn’t he? Voldemort had entered Avalon for him. He had climbed the Himalayas for Voldemort. What more could there be? 

“It is in our best interests if you cook,” Voldemort was saying. “I can hunt. We should air out the other chambers. It is silly to stay here, in bed, all day, you will concur.”

“Snowbells.” 

Voldemort looked at him, thrown off from his logistics. 

“The first order of business for me is gathering snowbells. And giving them to you,” Harry explained. “I don't have anything from Avalon, but you love the snowbells so.” 

“I don’t love snowbells. I find their scent soothing.”

“You love the snowbells so.” 

Voldemort looked to the ceiling, imploring some sort of divine intervention, Harry thought. 

“If the gods didn't talk to you on top of the Himalayas, they are unlikely to talk to you now,” Harry teased him. 

There was a smile lurking at the corners of Voldemort’s lips before he chased it away with a stern glare. Harry shook his head and kissed him many times.

"Heathen," Voldemort murmured, when they broke for breath. He clasped Harry's hand, and their hands were warm in the bright sunlight. "Agnisakshi." 

Harry had heard the sadhus speak of Agnisakshi. Union witnessed by fire, by the sun. The bride and groom walked around a ring of fire to marry and become one. In earlier times, if the groom died, the bride jumped into the pyre. He had found the stories horrifying and steeped in mysticism. He had never been fond of gods and mysticism.

And yet, what were they? Harry thought of Voldemort trying to immolate himself in this castle. He watched the sunlight play across the sharp contours of Voldemort's thin body, and leaping across to dance on Harry's skin. And he lifted his gaze to Voldemort's, and saw there fierce belonging mirroring what was in his own heart.

If this was to be their coda, so be it. 

——

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! And for making it to the end! I am very grateful for your patience with my rambling ways, and I hope the story brought you moments of reading pleasure. 
> 
> References from this chapter:  
> 1\. We all have places to stand. -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 2\. Snowbells -[Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 3\. Agnisakshi - Witnessed by fire. Sanskrit rituals of marriage. (refer: Agnisakshi - Lalithambika Antarjanam)  
> 4\. Coda-[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 5\. Witnessed by fire, witnessed by the sun - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile), [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 6\. I will always return to you - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 7\. She had always been better than the rest of them - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 8\. It smelled of time and tears - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 9\. It was not an alchemy between the mind and the heart. [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 10\. ...noble and weary, and yet indefatigable. [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 11\. "thy kingdom, thy will" [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 12\. Solomon and Sheba - The Old Testament  
> 13\. The Last Magician - The Once and Future King (T. H White)  
> 14\. The Pandavas - the protagonists of the Mahabharata.  
> 15\. Vyasa - writer of the Mahabharata, according to lore  
> 16\. Mahabharata - the tale of Pandavas and of Kauravas, Kings and brothers, and of how even Gods cannot avert the calamity of men, the greatest Sanskrit epic that survived time.  
> 17\. The Hindu pilgrimage - from Gangotri the glacier that birthed the Ganges, to the holy river-side sites of Kedarnath, Badrinath etc
> 
> Translations:  
> 1) ganja - marijuana  
> 2) sadhu - mendicant  
> 3) moksha - salvation  
> 4) karma - as you reap, so you sow  
> 5) Swargarohini - ascent into heaven, a mountain unscaled by man until 2016
> 
> Quotes:  
> 1) "You are a human being" - Bernie Sanders (2015)
> 
> (A)sexuality spectrum  
> 1) Characterisation mostly derived from psychological literature.   
> 2) If the psychology of sex is an interesting genre for you, try the Prometheus triptych or the Sunset RDSL arc.

**Author's Note:**

> References:  
> 1\. ‘Red falls the dew on these silver leaves’ - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 2\. ‘I must protect you, even from myself’ - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 3\. ‘He saw the world in eldritch colors’ - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 4\. ‘I believe in my right to survive’ - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 5\. ‘Before there were wands and wars, before little girls falling, there were two boys who loved lemon-drops.’ - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 6\. ‘Sleep well, sweet prince’, ‘brave, little prince’ -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 7\. ‘dare he call a sunbeam bright?’ -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 8\. ‘It is wholly of this unforgiving earth and he suffers everyday on that account, and he will have no reprieve even after the end.' -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 9\. 'A thrall to kill, a knave to save, a knight on crusade' - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 10\. 'Most wretched of all God's creation' -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 11\. 'etched the Himnusz in his wee heart' - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 12\. 'helpless, hated, half-alive, I would still kneel and accept my fate, if it meant sparing you' - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 13\. 'fierce and kind, prideful and humble, hateful and loving' -[Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 14\. 'he was perfection that eluded everything else of my making..' - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 15\. 'What is a day, a month, a year, if not markers imposed by humans in their obsession with explaining why the sun came up and why the seasons turned?' - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 16\. He was finer than any stallion bred - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 17\. they say that you are his soul - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 18\. I prefer him alive and with me - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 19\. Leave me with the wolves. - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 21\. The laws of the Gods cannot rule the passions of our hearts - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 22\. I am not him, I am not perfection, but I am here - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 23\. Perhaps the Gods know we shall not abase ourselves before them, unless we were brought low - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 24\. he was only a man, despite all he had done - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 25\. even pigs on their hind legs would after him dance. - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 26\. What the heart knew, the mind didn't - [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 27\. Nature had a way of conquering mere men - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 28\. Believing was easy surrender - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 29\. Destiny was only a word. - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 30\. And then face to face - [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 31\. Atropos - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 32\. what an eldritch creature - [Eldritch](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eldritch)  
> 33\. of a mother's love and a murderer's soul - [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 34\. the truth was beautiful to him - [Four Chord ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/551047)  
> 35\. they are the last heralds of the dusk - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 36\. was not left even with the ashes of what had been once a man - [Sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheSongOfSunset/profile)  
> 


End file.
